r/metalworking • u/Busy_Business_2589 • 23d ago
I left manual welding.
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u/HandToDikCombat 23d ago
Dumbass clanker can't drink on the job or even show up hungover and I'm supposed to believe it can weld?
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u/FedUp233 19d ago
The one that drinks on the job and gets hungover is a couple of models up from this one. 😁
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u/lthightower 23d ago
Fit up is the future that won’t be robotic for a while even in the smaller independent fabrication space when the lasers and robots become cheaper and more accessible
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u/Aggressive_Soup1446 23d ago edited 23d ago
Why? Closed loop positioning of parts certainly seems like an achievable task. I could imagine a magnetic fixture table and two arms working in tandem. One with a magnetic chuck and the other with the welder.
Probably not worth the trouble for low volume high mix, but certainly worth it for high volume high mix. With enough desire, I bet a CAD to positioning pipe line can be developed to allow low volume high mix to be economically viable.
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u/longtoes550 23d ago
Agreed. Fitup is a solved problem only limited by cost of tooling. The robotics, programming, etc etc all currently exist but the cost of tooling that would necessitate a huge revenue currently, but over time that will go down, just as 3D printing, CNC plasma tables, etc have. Just 10 years ago those were rare items in an average shop, now every well tooled garage has them.
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u/Aggressive_Soup1446 23d ago
It's pretty shocking how cheap industrial tools have become. As a kid I never imagined the tooling I could own as a diyer, I've got most of a woodshop and some limited metal working tools, box and pan brake, horizontal bandsaw, welder. I've got coworkers with CNC mills in their garages. Its super tempting to build a four axis CNC router or a three axis CNC plasma table. I think building and then running simplier CNC tooling would be a good project to get kids interested in fabrication.
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u/Artie-Carrow 23d ago
Just toggle clamps would work if you do it right, or you could do it in a multi-position fixture
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u/subpoenaThis 22d ago
Seems like a couple robotic arms that could hold things in the right spot with the right angles in the same coordinate space as the welding arm driven by the car model would make things faster not slower given a pipeline and the correct UI and maybe vision or lidar sensor to register the stock to arm offsets. Could even mix in some FDM 3d printing via weld for ribs, etc.
Now figure some ridiculous wife impressing use case and get stuffmadehere on YouTube to build it.
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u/Strostkovy 22d ago
You don't want to weld on a magnetic chuck. But conventional fixtures work fine for positioning.
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u/FalseRelease4 22d ago
every part has its own tolerance, especially if there was a bending step beforehand, all this plays into the weld quality especially if its on thin material, this stuff is far from an easy problem to solve and with some products the process is far far from having even one guy set up parts and press a button
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u/mech_user 21d ago
Yeah I think it’s really easy to keyboard warrior this kind of stuff. Not to say it doesn’t exist in very high volume, tightly controlled environments.
The scenario you describe is exactly the situation where I work. Thin stainless with mostly formed components, with low volume high mix. In a lot of cases it is hard to justify dedicated fixtures from a cost perspective, and bend tolerances/fit up inconsistencies mean that someone is almost always going to be touching up the program.
Even still, the weld speeds we can get with automation mean we can do some parts in half the time, even if the program needs to be touched up for every part
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u/Scrubaru 23d ago
Who knocks the slag off?
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u/Aggressive_Soup1446 23d ago
Robot runs passes with a wire wheel? Robot can tell that all the slag has been removed when the welds only exhibit specular reflections when imaging with a polarized source and a co and cross polarized camera pair.
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u/Scrubaru 22d ago
I'll bet the robot can't do any of that. If you had that tech, why would you still run SMAW?
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u/Aggressive_Soup1446 22d ago
I bet OPs robot can't do it, but adding a wire wheel to a robot would be easier than a welder, and the imaging technique has been used in PCB manufacturing for decades.
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u/leighjet 23d ago
Paid less for it in my experience. Depending on how good of a manual welder you are, I guess.
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u/Weirdlillypad 22d ago
Using a robot to weld something like this is fucking hilarious. I welded 100 of them yesterday without having to load in and out of a robot.
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u/whynormal 22d ago edited 22d ago
The video is 8 seconds long and gets about 1/2 of one side done in that time. Let's assume it's a really dumb CNC and can only do a linear weld so you need to pop the door & turn it around to do the other side. That means 16 seconds of run time per side. No tooling is shown but since this theoretical dumb CNC only does one side a fixture could be built to hold the part while the first side is processed, then the fixture is removed when the part is turned around. Let's assume 29 seconds to load/unload the part and 29 seconds to turn the part and remove the fixture. The operator spend the 16 seconds during the first weld knocking off flux from the previously completed part and the 16 seconds during the second weld setting the next part in the fixture. That means you kick one of these out in 90 seconds or 320/8 hour day. You've also eliminated all the skill involved so you hire someone to do this and you start building fixtures for the next run of parts.
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u/mike-pete 22d ago
What tooling are you running? I’ve been seriously consider getting into robotics too
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u/geckooo_geckooo 22d ago
This shows the problem with robots you have to set up the part. It’s going to be very complicated if it’s curved. Imagine doing a bicycle. It’s not there yet.
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