welding instructor needs info

[jolene davis]

My name is jolene davis and I teach Welding/Advanced Welding at an east TX High School and Community College. I am here browsing for information on sheet metal manipulation. I have had my introductory "Principles of Manufacturing" HS students build a 3 dimensional star and a box with a lid. I would like to be able to go farther. My work experience has always been as a Structural ironworker/fitter/welder and I have always called sheet metal work "sh*t mental" as it is harder than it looks and I have never been good at it. I want to build an english wheel/planishing hammer in my school shop and need more information. We are a public school with VERY SMALL budgets so I will end up funding this myself just so the kids can have the experience. If I can stay under $500. for a decent piece of equipment that's pretty user friendly, I will be happy.

Jolene

[HEATNBEAT]

Hi Jolene and welcome!
For $500 it is going to be tuff to get both! Unless you make them your self. I would go to a local manufacturing business and see if they have tubing drop off they could donate to the school for an English wheel frame. 3x6... 4x8 I would try to get as thick as possible if you go with a smaller tube. If you do search you will find many builds with dimensions.
Good luck!

[thingsthatfly2]

make them work for the shape... hand tools! sand bags and post dollies. its going to be hard to do either for under 500. a weak english wheel develops bad habits....

[Joe Hartson]

Jolene, welcome and thanks for the introduction. Hope you enjoy the site and find it helpful. Thanks for joining us. There is a lot of information on the site to help you get started and give you an idea of the basics of metal shaping. In sheet metal shaping there is only three things you can do to the metal, bent, shrink and stretch. Shrinking is hard, bending and stretching is easier.

Here are a couple of link that you might want to look at.

http://allmetalshaping.com/showthread.php?t=2926

http://allmetalshaping.com/showthread.php?t=3321

There are a lot of others that will help you get started.

The first thing that you have to learn in metal shaping is what the metal is going to do when you hit it. You learn this by working the metal with hand tools and not machines. The search function on this site is your friend and can be very helpful. If you have questions, ask and someone will try to help you.

[Peter Tommasini]

Hi Jolene
Welcome to the forum
Peter

[weldtoride]

Hi Jolene, and welcome to the forum from a fellow (retired) shop teacher. As for the wheel and hammer frames, did any of your former employers work with appropriate sized structural tubing? If not, HeatnBeat is right, you can build them yourself and come in under $500. I am building a wheel at home and I have $55 in my 29" throat wheel frame, including legs and 4" tubing for the upper adjuster. Using Kerry's guidance:

http://allmetalshaping.com/forumdisplay.php?f=29

My frame is 4 X 7 x .310 (5/16) wall rectangular tube and calculates to a stiffness rating of 21. I got the material at a local scrapyard at the going rate to go back out with steel, .20-.25 a pound last summer.

For the adjusting mechanism, I bought 1" fine-thread rod, hex nuts, and thrust bearings from http://www.use-enco.com/CGI/INSRHM. Around $20 total. I purchased a lot of tooling and material from them for the schools I taught in, their catalog clearly states brand names and/or country of origin for most products, if it's import thay will indicate so.

The upper and lower anvils are going to be the the harder items to source inexpensively. Do you have access to a machine shop at your school or a neighboring tech school? If not, my suggestion is to start with a stout frame, go with cheap wheels at first if you have to, and then upgrade later. We had a bench top Metal Ace wheel at the school I taught at. The anvils were good, but the frame was noodley. In retrospect, I would have put the effort into a stouter frame had I known what I later learned.

plenty of info on making your own anvils, here's a start:
http://allmetalshaping.com/showthread.php?t=694

I certainly don't mean to presuppose to tell you how to do your job, but at my first teaching position, we had next to nothing for a materials budget, but we were in an industrial area. I established arrangements with several local job shops where I could pick up materials in my truck from their scrap bins to use for our welding/metals program. When the students were done I brought our scrap back to them on the next run to pick up more, so they got most of it back. Finally I found a larger manufacturer who didn't want it back, they wrote it off as a donation. He gave us 4-6000 pounds at a time, he just put his drops into pallet boxes right on the shop floor for us. I sent a roll-off tow truck to get it, driver was also an ex-student so we got a break there, too.

If your department has an advisory committee, that might be a place to start to look for donations. I also used Thomas Regional directory to find job shops local to me, used to be paper, now digital: http://www.thomasnet.com/

Hope this helps some.

[HEATNBEAT]

Here is a link to my radius cutter. It was cheap and easy to make
http://allmetalshaping.com/showthrea...e+lower+anvils
After I machined them I also sanded them and polished them. I have less than $5 in each one!

[jhnarial]

One of the hardest aspects of metal shaping is the welding. Understanding what, when and why causes the distortion of the metel when being welded. You can be a great metal shaper but if you can not weld two pieces together without it becoming distorted it is all for nothing.
I believe it is the first and most importan aspect to metal shaping.

Try to weld to flat sheets of 18g with out any distorition. If you can't do that then there is no need for a english wheel or planishing hammer. Metal does not like to change it's shape so break it into manageable pieces which almost always require welding.

[David Gardiner]

I could not agree with you more Johnny!. Sometimes people move onto bigger and better machines thinking that it will improve their abillity without mastering the basics.

Welcome to the forum Jolene!


David

[jolene davis]

Oh my gosh, have I come to the right place. You guys are amazing. Thanks for the links and info. Now it's time to do some homework. I'll get back to you. Thanks tons, jolene