Making noise is part of working in your garage, but we always want to do what we can to limit the noise we HAVE to hear. One of the things we can do to limit the noise in your shop is choosing a good place to put your air compressor […]
Tech Articles
Can Air Compressor Tanks Be Connected Together?
One question we get from customers is if they can hook their air tanks together in tandem to get more air output from their shop. Often times this is when a person has a small air compressor in their garage and want to get a larger reservoir of air before their compressor runs. In theory the idea could work where you could get twice as much air to use before you have to wait on your compressor to refill, but it isn’t always the magic answer. We decided to cover the details below.
Get Comfortable and Step Up Your TIG Game
Step up your TIG game and take your machine to the next level, enabling you to perform stronger and better looking welds. Regardless of the capabilities of the machine that you have, if you are looking to lay down the same great looking welds over and over, you have to be comfortable in your welding position. It’s good practice to take your time to get into a comfortable position and take a dry run before you start an arc. This will tell you whether your position will enable you to complete your weld from end to end without stopping and starting.
Powder Coating Motorcycle Parts to Make it Stand Out
Powder Coating is about one of the strongest coatings you can put on a part of your vehicle. What this does mean is that changing the color or design on your powdered parts can be a bit difficult to do. Recently Product Manager Beau B. decided to redo the color scheme on his motorcycle and document the process of stripping the powder off some of the parts and recoating them with fresh powder. It’s not as bad as you think!
How to Tighten up a Weld Seam on a Patch Panel.
No one’s perfect, but we can do our best to strive to get the closest we can get to perfection every day. These ideals are the same whether you’re a cook, a machinist, a landscaper, or a guy in his garage building an old car or motorcycle. One big lesson I’ve learned over the past few years has been to slow down and take the time to make sure that parts fit together as nice as possible before welding. Just blindly rough cutting a piece and trying to make it fit another piece is going to end with an uneven weld seam and won’t end well!
The Sorcery of Tuck Shrinking Sheet Metal
The simplest way to describe how metal moves or reacts when you shrink or stretch it is to imagine pizza dough. When you stretch the dough out to make a larger pie you’ll see it gets larger AND thinner as you stretch it out. If you watch the process they start with a small, thick, round piece of dough that they kneed out until the dough is the desired thickness and put the excess material on the edges for the “crust” The same if they wanted to make the pie smaller, you’d need to gather the dough together creating bunches and smooth it all together until it was the desired shape. Metal reacts almost EXACTLY the same.
Where and when do I use Epoxy Primer on my project?
In the past self etching primer was the go-to coating to apply over bare metal on a car. Metal required little prep work to apply it, it flashes/drys quickly, and it came in 1K Aerosol cans for small jobs. In the past 5-10 years you’ve probably been hearing more people talk about Epoxy Primers and their use as opposed to self etching primer. We decided to give you some insight on where and when epoxy primer works best.
Complex Rust Patch Panel Made Easy
At times rust repair can be ultra simple; cut the old rust out, cut a square of fresh metal and weld it in. But those repairs aren’t usually as frequent as we’d like. Rust seems to like to creep into a curved area or into a body line that takes more care to repair. I recently decided to tackle a large rusty area of the rear portion of the floor on Project Pile House.
How to Channel A Ford Model A
Back in the late 1940’s-1960’s it was pretty easy to distinguish if a hot rod in a magazine was built on the east coast or on the west. One of the big differences is how the profile and stance of the car differed. An “east coast hot rod” was easily identifiable by its low ride height and body channeled pretty hard over the chassis without chopping or lowering the roof. It seems as the years went on guys were channeling and lowering their cars more and more until there was almost no ground clearance and no headroom from the raised floor.