What did you do today?

[true temper]

I ordered a cold saw. The Evolution Rage 3 DB with 10 inch blade, to be exact. It will replace my 15 year old 12 inch chop saw. The DB is for "double Bevel" which allows easy creation of crown molding. It will also do nice cuts on 1/4 inch steel up to 11 inches wide. It will be here Wednesday.

I chose the Rage 3DB because the linear slides will allow it to do everything the older saw does and then a lot more. It will be nice for very clean cuts of tubing and rod. And on top of that it's cheap on Amazon. Now all I have to do is to make a nice stand for it.

Dan

Here is a stand I built many years ago I like it because you can quickly take the saw off


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[J Tiers]

Here is a stand I built many years ago I like it because you can quickly take the saw off ...
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How heavy and how big a diameter is the brake drum?

I have a bunch of large brake disks, that I wanted to use for stand bases on vises and some other things, but I cannot convince myself they are large/heavy enough to be stable. Maybe if I used two, one over the other just as a weight.

[Tim Clarke]

How heavy and how big a diameter is the brake drum?

I have a bunch of large brake disks, that I wanted to use for stand bases on vises and some other things, but I cannot convince myself they are large/heavy enough to be stable. Maybe if I used two, one over the other just as a weight.

This looks like a typical HD truck/trailer drum. 60 plus pounds. Working surface, about 16x 7 1/2". I used to buy the heaviest ones I could find for our fleet of garbage wagons. Some were so heavy I could barely handle 'em. Stop by your nearest truck shop/dealership and ask the shop foireman if you can have a couple for grider stands. All truck shop guys have at least 1 grinder on a drum stand.

[true temper]

It’s plenty heavy for the cutoff saw. I have my 2x72 belt grinder mounted on one too., wish it were a bit heavier once in a while. Guess I could pour it full of concrete.

[Tim Clarke]

It’s plenty heavy for the cutoff saw. I have my 2x72 belt grinder mounted on one too., wish it were a bit heavier once in a while. Guess I could pour it full of concrete.

Yup. Ought to hold a whole bag of premix. While you're at it drill and tap the rim for 3 leveling screws.

[Willy]

This looks like a typical HD truck/trailer drum. 60 plus pounds. Working surface, about 16x 7 1/2". I used to buy the heaviest ones I could find for our fleet of garbage wagons. Some were so heavy I could barely handle 'em. Stop by your nearest truck shop/dealership and ask the shop foireman if you can have a couple for grider stands. All truck shop guys have at least 1 grinder on a drum stand.

Tim, I'm sure you might have thought they were 60 pounds plus, but after all those years I'll bet you back says different. Mine does.
I remember very well one day when I was in the penalty box one day and had to load a pallet of Gunite lightweight 16x7.5 brake drums by myself onto a flat bed by hand. I'll never forget the printing on the box proclaiming they were the lightest in the industry at 100lbs. Apparently the others are 112 or 115 each. Like I would have noticed, they may as well have been 200 by the time I finished, sure felt like it.

That phrase, "lightweight" is still burned into my head from that hot August day in a dusty freight yard.

[Arcane]

I have my grinder on a brake drum and to counter the uneven floor in my shop I cut three short lengths of rubber tubing, slit them and slipped them over the drum lip at equal spacings. Not only did they stop the rocking but they also work as nice vibration dampers.

[Arcane]

Yesterday I went looking for my B&S #7 taper for my dividing head and couldn't find it anywhere and I KNEW I had put it away in a safe place so I wouldn't lose it. ARRRGH!

Today I woke up at 6AM with the hazy memory of having stuck it in one of the spare holes in the wood block I had made to hold my set of #3 MT collets. Of course I HAD to get dressed and go check and sure enough, there it was. As many of you have already guessed...it was in a drawer that I had looked through very thoroughly...TWICE! ARRRGH!

[Ridgerunner]

Did this a little while ago. The water meter pit for this house became too low from the road being repaved many times through the years. I was doing a new sidewalk so had to raise the pit up. I dug around the pit and drilled a couple of holes through it. Put a strap through the holes and watered around the pit for lubrication and pulled it up. In the last picture some concrete can be seen to the right of the meter pit cover from the old sidewalk which shows the old elevation. In the "old" days if there was city water, these pits were crock pipe so would have been a harder job.

[Ridgerunner]

I had to make a nut for a stud on the back of a radio. The radio is in a plastic box and the stud has to stick through that box plus a metal bracket. It is an M5 x .8. The stud is not long enough to to get a washer and nut on; nor a flange nut. A regular nut will just catch a thread but is too small in diameter and goes through the slot in the metal bracket without catching. When I made this nut I could not champher the hole because I wanted the thread to catch as close as possible.

[plastikosmd]

Getting ready to tig the bar back together
Dual vices are handy

[danlb]

I picked up a $85 30 inch bulk storage cart from Harbor Freight to use as a dedicated stand for my new cold saw. I was going to make my own from scratch, but when I started adding up the cost of materials the HF cart made more sense.

It came partly assembled. with the need to mount the wheels and bolt the legs together. It went fairly quick, with only one badly threaded carriage bolt out of the 60 that they provided. The nuts are all of the nylock variety.

I did learn a lesson when I went to use my hammer-drill to tighten the nuts. A few of the carriage bolts were not a good match for the square holes in the sheet-metal. I was using a 13mm socket in my drill, so I just flipped the control to hammer mode and went at it. It worked fine the first few times. About the third one the bolt refused to stop spinning so I gave it a bit more speed. It suddenly caught and in an instant the 700 in./lbs. of torque spun that drill around, pinning my hand to the shelf I was mounting. Fortunately the drill's rotation was stopped almost instantly when my finger left the trigger. That's good since there does not sem to be a clutch in the hammer mode.

Lesson of the day is that 700 inch pounds is more than I can handle with just one hand.

[mattthemuppet]

Dual vices are handy

that gave me an idea what to do with my old bench vise when I refurb the Wilton I have. If I put a base on it that I can hold in the woodworkers vise I have in the middle of my bench, line it up right, then I can do the same and hold long stuff securely. Doesn't come up very often, but it'll be very useful when it does! thanks

[Cenedd]

Today my cold saw arrived...
I've unboxed it but now I need to get a stand for it.

Actually Evolution's stand isn't bad. It's a folding leg design with extendable rollers each side and the saw clips onto the two tubular cross members. Depends if folding is a good thing for you or you have room to always have it set up. Mine hangs from the ceiling due to lack of space. Just above the door....so good for ridding the shop of unwanted visitors by just pointing it out

I have the Rage 3 single bevel. It's good but don't believe it will cut aluminium very well. Perhaps the harder stuff but generic eBay 10mm thick bar just smears more than cuts. To be fair, this could be more the metal rather than the saw. Will find out when I try 60mm steel square tube next! Works in videos so fingers crossed.

[danlb]

I opted for a roll around storage cart from HF. It was only $84 on sale this week so it was actually cheaper than most of the other options. It has a drawer and two shelves available. It also has a top compartment, but since the saw is on top that storage is sacrificed. I'll need to put a barrier behind it to keep the chips off the storage shelves. The cart assembled in about 30 minutes. The steel is fairly stout and the paint was acceptable.

I did some test cuts with the "universal" blade that came with it and was not as happy as I hoped. When cutting steel it was LOUD and I kept changing the pressure and speed in an attempt to get smooth movement. The cut ended up straight but with visible facets. When I did aluminum, the rod was not supported at the cut, and you can see that it vibrated, again resulting in a less than perfect cut.

I suspect that I can do better with practice and maybe a clamp on vice to hold the piece. I was pleased with the speed of the cuts.

A few pictures.

1) On the stand. It is at a good height, and the saw fits without overhang.
2 and 3) a cut on a 3x18 inch mild steel. Slightly faceted, though I don't know if that was my fault for irregular feed. It is a nice 90 degree cut
4) unknown aluminum 3/4 inch. The cut is very rough.