hi I'm will I'm Jamie Jamie we are here in your shop at m5 and there's tons and
tons of amazing looking boxes with interesting labels like oil clay on the
shelves behind us but I think the shelves are cooler than everything
that's on the wall put together these shelves are there they're
surprising what they can do they're made out of this stock here it's 1 inch
square steel tubing and you know it there's a reason that I have stacks and
stacks of it these shelves for example they're about 220 feet high and they go
about 80 feet back in the shop and I'd say it took me about three days with a
helper to put these together I build them from scratch at a fraction of the
cost of you know store-bought shelves the kinds of things that you get at Home
Depot that you kind of bolt together or snap together the assembly of this is so
fast that it's actually easier than bolting ready-made stuff I can I can
custom make something easier and quicker so you can assemble a premade object and
I want to make one further point though about this the the square the
rectangular steel tubing presents you with a surface like this that you can
you can put two things together and it makes a really nice place to to lay a
bead and and it's flat if you get round tubing not so though there's the only
one tiny point of contact between two round things that go together exactly so
we stock this by the ton here and we build everything with it we build
bridges we built shelves we build tables we build if we need to build any kind of
structure we can throw it together so much faster with this because of that
little simple joint right there well and even though the tube of the steel tubing
is more expensive than say lumber what you told me is that when you factor in
the cost of labor of doing everything together you end up more or less the
same price right with the steel tubing versus the the two by fours
well and actually it's it's probably not all that much more expensive if any
depending on what you're what you're doing if I build a table out of this
stuff it's really sturdy and I can pick it up and walk
with it because it's so lightweight I do the same thing with a with two by fours
and other kinds of lumber and it's a monster you know and it and then I you
use it hammer on it for a while and it's creaking and it's all this this thing we
have these tables here that we built that or they're just they're so much
nicer there's no there's really no comparison easier to build sturdier
lighter weight last forever so what we're going to talk about today is
welding this is this gluing metal together is welding right yes um and
you're going to show us what you did to build these shelves and a bunch of other
stuff and let's just get right into it
before we talk about specifics and what you should go by if you're gonna want to
learn how to weld what's the basic theory behind this whole process well
welding involves a piece of metal that you're going to weld on okay and and a
an electrical arc okay now the old-school version is called
stick welding it's like this thing and you put a ground on to the piece that
you're going to weld on okay and then you have your have another have the
other end of your electrical circuit hooked up to the to the stick in this
case and you touch it to that and you're welding and it gets incredibly hot and
then some of this material will move over there yeah well it's molten and
then the two things that we're touching or are permanently bound at them yes the
only other thing that is really key here is that when you heat metal up to where
it's melting like that it'll absorb nitrogen from the from the atmosphere
okay and that makes for a very porous and poor weld it doesn't work it's very
splattery and it's ugly okay so what they do is a shield the the welded area
until it cools off and you can do that either by flooding it with a gas or you
put a in the case of this which is old school stuff we we we use these a lot
but for coarser things and generally outdoors where there's wind and you
can't contain the the shielding gas but this coating on this stick as the stick
melts from the arc the coating also melts over it and forms a glass-like
coating that that that protects the weld and keeps it from absorbing nitrogen so
but the the most common thing and that nowadays the cheapest and easiest thing
to use is literally like a hot glue gun okay and that's these over here it's
called a MIG welder and and that stands for metal inert gas and in that case if
you if you have your piece of metal grounded and you've got your you've got
your your MIG gun the MIG actually feeds this wire out of the tip of it oh so you
don't to worry about no okay and and it also because of this
this cup to end your you're pumping the shielding gas out of this which protects
the weld so it's like this all in one nifty little thing and all you do is go
I pull the trigger and you're you're welding so it actually is like a hot
glue gun it's literally a hot glue gun people are afraid of welding because you
know you got to wear a mask you got to wear gloves and you have a special
equipment but the thing is welders like this one here you know you can pay
thousands of dollars for them but you can also pay like a couple hundred bucks
and get a cheap one and that's what I did when I first learned how to weld was
I just went to the store and bought one and hooked it up and started welding
because it's literally you pull the trigger and you're welding now there are
a lot of finer subtleties about it that will allow you to get better over the
time but these are our go-to means of attaching things together because it is
literally like you know it's it's like glue that dries in a fraction of a
second right in the minute that you're you're done gluing it so one of the
cooler welders you have that you said you use a ton is this little
battery-powered guy that you can take on boats and stuff like that we Don power
yeah these are new this one's made by Hobart Hobart sponsors us so we we have
all Hobart stuff and they I don't know if anybody else makes this type of thing
or not but this is like a suitcase it's you know a heavy suitcase but it's got a
little battery in it and and it's all self-contained now you guys can you take
this on the plane with you well I doubt that but you know you've
got your same basic thing okay but you've got your your plug in cord
because you can you just plug this into the wall and use it that way but you've
got your your ground and you've got your MIG gun and what happens is when you you
know when you put this onto your piece of metal that you're going to you're
going to weld on and you hold your you put your mask on and you hold the
trigger down or you hold the gun against the metal and you pull the trigger
what's happening is that that inside this thing the batteries behind here but
this is a spool of wire that gets fed into this tube that comes out the end
here okay and it's just pushing it through yeah and in the case of this
particular one because it's it's so portable we generally use it with a flux
core wire even though it's a skinny little wire it's got a small amount of
the flux the same as what's on a stick welder but it's inside the wire okay and
so when you're welding that flux is all as melting as floating on the top of the
weld and melting across it and in protecting the weld from you don't have
to have argon or yet over here and you have to chip this flux off at the end or
now well if you're doing multiple passes you might but the with these it's it's
actually such a small amount because it's so controlled and that it's it's
not a problem it's not it's not a very massive thing but I just love these
things you know you can go up on it if you've got to go up on a scissor lift or
something like that and like if I'm welding these these shelves you know I
can just have it with me I can plug it in or not plug it in it runs depending
on how much you're welding it'll run for you know good half hour or something
like that before you have to recharge it so for quick fixes of like if you were
if you were a serious off-roader for example you might want to have one of
these in your vehicle in case you break something on the car that would
otherwise require getting a tow truck out in the middle of nowhere
exactly fantastic so you said you learned by just going out and buying a
welder and kind of mucking around with it in your shop yeah you can read the
manual when you plug it in you turn it on you do have to wear some safety
equipment though you generally should wear gloves although a lot of times I
don't because I'm okay with the pain okay um but you need a mask like that
one over there these guys it also doubles for eclipses right so you can
watch it you can look straight at the Sun with that or if you want to one of
the things that also makes this a lot easier than it used in the old days you
have this mask and you put it on you couldn't see anything unless you're
welding so you kind of had to feel your way around in the dark
just paying the but with these these have there's a button on the inside that
you push on to turn it on okay it has an auto darkening thing and it senses the
the light coming off from the weld and before that light can can blind you it
darkens the shield oh cool yeah so you can actually have this on and be looking
at the at you can look right at the object and see it without any external
light you know to help you so you don't have time flipping your visor yeah
and it's and it'll just darken when when when you need it to be dark okay let's
try it out okay assume it's on look away that's it that's it yeah
that looked real easy yeah it's a literally again is just like hot glue
now generally the where the subtlety comes in is that that you want to you
you kind of want to lay the weld down in a pattern that you'll see people sort of
weaving back and forth okay and so to get a really nice neat looking weld
there it has some practice but it's pretty much just doing what I just did
and playing with it until you get it right
that it's a real hot piece of metal Jamie let's look at one more thing that
you built with with welding in the square tubes I want to I want you to
show off your shot your tables okay so Jamie when you first showed me the
secret of these tables I was really blown away it's a really neat piece of
design they're steel tubing yeah just like we for the shelves
one-inch steel tubes yeah Heather and they're lightweight yeah you and I can
lift it it looks really heavy but the wood probably weighs more than the metal
it does actually it's not exactly you know like fancy but all you have to do
is you pull off a couple of screws they nest they nest and so this works you
know we have these narrow tables that we like and I put these together because
you know they're just wide enough when you're working on them like you can
reach everything yeah it goes the good against the wall table for just general
workshop use yeah if you make it out of a four by eight you you can't you know
sometimes you need a larger work area but you can't reach all of it and just
like I said sometimes you need a large work area you can have if you have a
four by four tabletop surface which is a typical bench then you do this to it
with this nesting thing and you've got eight feet square which is a huge table
and sometimes that's what you need like if you're we pulled these out in
particular for doing stuff with fabric you need that large table to keep it
flat while you're working you don't want to work yeah floor I can practically
fill this whole room with with table surface so this is just ten pieces of
tube welded in a few places and then there's another frame that's just like
it but with the exercise you left off two sides because steel it's rigid
enough that it doesn't wobble again I can put together something like this
literally in a few minutes and it's just hot glue together you know we also by
the way with the steel tubing we use tools that are you know like chop saws
or they're almost like wood saws Dewalt makes one that that we use it's not
terribly expensive and it just has blade with more teeth on it and
it rotates a little more slowly so it's it's fine for cutting it's made for
cutting metal Jamie thank you so much for showing us around the shop and show
you a little bit about welding today and awesome tables and shelves my pleasure
there's a whole bunch more to learn about welding obviously yeah there are
all different kinds of welders there are all kinds of different techniques some
of them fall into the same category as the MIG welding like plasma cutting in
particular it's another one of these guns and you can literally hold a ruler
on the piece you want to cut and just go zip and it you know it's cut that and
MIG welding it just makes all of this stuff so easy and accessible for anybody
that anybody that has a shop that wants to make stuff needs to have one of these
guys it's worth learning how to do yeah fantastic we'll be back with more from
Testim soon I'm well I'm Jamie see you guys later