Another soccer guard (3)

Here’s a picture of my setup for how I’m able to (relatively) quickly bang out some bars for the soccer guard.

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When I set up the mill like this and use the vertical tube to orient and locate the horizontal tube, I just need to drive the X axis to the predetermined spot while squirting a little coolant, and all of the tubes I make are the same within a few hundredths of an inch. It’s not an accurate way to do it from setup to setup, but it’s good enough for what I need, and it gets the gaps tight enough for easy TIG welding.

It could be better, but with the tools I have at Techshop and the size of batches I do, this is working well enough for me right now.

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2 Responses to Another soccer guard (3)

  1. ex-Gooserider says:

    Looks like a good solution. The guy at the Asylum that does the bike frame building class has a bunch of cheapo HF-class mini-lathes that he has set up with custom jigs and cutters, but that seems overkill for what you are doing… However his concept of making a fixed position jig that you clamp the tube into once, and then use to make all the cuts seems like it might be worth while if you ever scale up.

    • Joe C says:

      Absolutely! I think that what will be even more useful would be a jig to hold everything square and spaced properly while doing the tack welding. I am about to do a large-ish batch of the rear guards, and if they weren’t significantly simpler than the front guards, then I think I’d make such a jig.

      At Techshop we have some precision (they started as precision before people started screwing them up…) fixturing tables in the welding area that I can insert pins on the grid to construct right angles and clamp things into place. That will work well enough this time around.

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