The Beauty of Pulse Arc Welding
hermansilver.com
hermansilver.com
Unfortunately I've been unable to maintain a decent work/life balance due to the high cost of living. As a result, I honestly die a little inside each time I see an article posted about them.
The last update was in 2013, where I completed the EHT "popstart" circuit (to replace the expensive retractable electrode, and allow the use of a standard TIG head): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4c5Le2kT6w
Some day I'll complete it!
Pulsed welding is super useful for filling and repair operations on thin sheet where you can "shoot" a tiny blob of filler wire into the joint/hole/gap and fill it in. Or perform small butt-seam welds without filler. I've worked with fiber and yag lasers and the welds are really clean and solid. You can even weld larger parts together with decent strength or tack fo larger welding operations. Even some of the electron beam welders there had a pulse welding mode.
"Won't fit in a laser cabinet" - You just need a better laser setup instead of a fixed optics machine. Buy a fiber laser, like an IPG QCW 450/4500 get a small D30 head, 125mm lens, coax nozzle with a camera tube (don't buy the camera from them as they just resell a Sentech for double the $) and build another station like your TIG setup but mount the laser head instead. You'll have one hell of a fiber welder. You might even be able to move work over from your TIG setup. They might offer a binocular setup for the head or have one fabricated if you don't want the camera/monitor setup.
I suspect that it has since been superseded by the current PUK6 model (and previously the PUK 5, judging by search results)
the problems start when your shop retools without a cycle time analysis, makes small tweaks to existing metal profiles without updating the bots, or finds out robots aren't magic money saving golems. for me its been the last one because every shop Ive been in will literally run an autowelder until the teeth in the gears sound like an empty bag of cheetos and the tool path leaves about an inch of over-weld and spatter. the overweld and quality issues get the grinder treatment from a line worker whos pulled out to do lots and lots of reworks so your cycle time is now bob's cycle time. now eventually the setup to pulsemig wont make sense anymore or nobody can remember how to switch it to GMAW or a customer needs a mig joint so more tweaks happen until your $250k bot is now just a pneumatic arm that shoots metal boogers at a joint and sends it to rework.
no shop wants to spend money on a programmer or mechanical maintenance unless the machines literally swinging around in a fiery puddle of its own hydraulic.
Just put the fire out and slap some jbweld on it. We don't have time for a repair call.
In your shop the simple mistake is that it's no longer a "welding shop", it's a robotics shop that happens to do welding. Robot maintenance is a thing, and it's a different specialisation to welding, even if the robot is doing welding.
In the IT space, I see this with the public cloud. It's not just someone else's data centre that you're renting. It's a dev-sec-ops integrated platform, basically a new "distributed operating system" that needs an entirely different bag of tools, training, and even corporate structure to support.
Just this morning someone form a legacy "DBA" team asked me: "Where do I go to add a new user to the database?"
Err...
That's not a click-ops task any more. She would have to know how to use Git, a JSON templating language, PowerShell, and know about PaaS configuration automation via deployment pipelines.
The cloud is no longer managed by teams like Networks + DBAs + Sysops! It is now site reliability engineers (SREs) that handle most of those cross-cutting concerns. The entire IT department of that enterprise needs to be restructured and their staff retrained (or made redundant!) to manage a public cloud.
You workshop probably needs the same approach.
I run a 4kW fibre laser, but I've also worked alongside enough trades and technicians I'm also: remote hands; infrastructure engineer; maintenance fitter; electrician; cable hauler; SQL database manager; Delphi hacker; desktop support; VoIP telephony support; network engineer; refrigeration technician, as well as being a certified boilermaker-welder tradie with 26 years in the trade.
We just replaced the Y-axis ball screw on the laser, but only after it was slopping about 0.6mm.
I know shops where expensive equipment is sitting idle or broken because they can't find, and can't afford to pay for, someone with my experience.
(I have no idea how feasible that is, I'm just curious.)
On stupider machines that are only 10s of thousands of dollars/euros/etc, you also have to be certain that what the machine expects for tool geometry matches reality (meaning that the correct tool was in the correct tool location, that the tool is mounted in the holder at just the right length, that the tool itself hasn't deformed, etc.
That said, I wouldn't bet against AI stuff potentially being good at generating tool paths in the future.
Sometimes I think that existing CNC stuff might be too dumb. Where is the lathe equivalent of auto-probing a 3d printer bed or using machine vision to monitor the print? Where is the mill equivalent of visual examining each part like a pick and place machine does? Why can't I put a piece of metal in a vise and just tell the mill to square of the ends? It could be that what I'm picturing is only stuff that casual users would be interested in, and thus there isn't sufficient money to develop it.
Also let say that the use case are a bit different. a 3d printer is a far far far more controlled environment
A CNC starts with an unknown block on the table, held by an unknown workholding fixture, made of an unknown material. There just is not enough information to not crash into something unless programmed around it. Or just run way too fast and destroy tools.
In theory you could design sets of rules, but now you're having to add so much specificity to a design it's a big time waste. There's not really any meaningful entry level CNC machines, so if you can pay for the big machine... you kind of can pay for the expertise to not destroy the machine.
It also often works better because doing small parts can overheat the plastic. Moving between copies lets things cool down.
But anyway it was just an example of a scenario where the slicer might not have enough information to know how to not crash the print head.
(1) Where the head is. (2) If you program it right, where the end of the tool is. (3) If you program it right, what the width of the cutting edge of the tool is.
That's it. You could maybe prevent it from diving the tool into the table. But you won't prevent it from trying to take a 2" cut into D2 steel. Or going down into a pocket and crashing the tool holder into a section of the workpiece. Or going down into a pocket and rapid moving left, slamming the tool into the workpiece (which if you're lucky will just break the tool).
... And, if it's using steppers, it only knows that much if it hasn't slipped/missed/lost a step.
Edit to add: E.g. it fully recommended that I use a G38 instead of g31 in a macro, which would on my machine would probably destroy my probe.
That 'full conviction' part is the kicker. I don't mind if an AI says "gee, this might work", or "maybe this?" But the confident idiocy is going to kill someone. I asked one what the best breed of dog was for a family with a child who had allergy problems and was sensitive to dander. It said a golden retriever was best, since they are hypoallergenic and don't ever shed, plus they're friendly and eager to please.
The trouble is, I think, that it's a dying art; for years a lot of these craftsmen have been superseded by cheap mass-produced fashion jewelry on the one hand, and cheaper or more practical every day use items. There's less pieces in people's homes that are worth handing down to younger generations.
But this can be reversed, it just means people need to make investments into items that may not be immediately useful or won't be used daily, things like grandfather clocks, jewelry, display pieces, art, etc.
One example I can think of is that my parents have an "analog" weather station on their wall, it's got things like a quicksilver thermometer / barometer, a weather glass, and a blurb of text, etc. They bought it because quicksilver was being banned for use in thermometers etc, so they figured it would be the last chance.
But the other factor, and we're zooming out a bit now, is that people have less permanence in their lives nowadays. Home ownership is decreasing fast, and people seem less interested in "being set for life", e.g. buying a house with the intent of living there forever and/or raising a family. But that's very tangential, lol.
I have no idea, but the microscope he's looking through could certainly have UV protection built-in. Or perhaps the pulses are so short and small that the cumulative risk is negligible?
Either way, it seems to me like there could be ways for it to be safe enough to require minimal PPE while still producing some non-zero amount of UV.
More rapidly it gives you a lingering after image and feeling like your eyeball is full of sand
Edit: It's TIG in the video. I assumed jewelry used MIG because that's normally how thin copper is welded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyAaX0RZMVc&t=70s
if silver starts becoming more decorative and less of a specie I'll probably try in earnest
I can see the theoretical benefit in how quickly you can put down material but all of the people who actually need that in practice are probably already using something that feeds off a spool.
Edit: Just noticed he mentions in the video laser welding is more suited to smaller items
You could use a lead test swab. They come as small as precision q-tips.
anyone know what these POSTs to play.google.com/log are for