Today was a small kalym. A familiar trucker asked me to repair the bracket from his MAZA. This is the state of the bracket, parts of the shelves were bent or torn. Cut all this out, and weld in new ones.
I immediately take a square and measure the width of these shelves. It turns out 40 mm, this is the size of a standard 40 strip with a thickness of 4 mm. That is, such a strip is freely sold at a metal warehouse.
The weather is bad outside, rain and snow in the morning. Although it is not more than half a kilometer to the base from my garage, it is quite reluctant to walk and get wet to buy a meter of strip. What to do? What garage welders always do in such cases is to look at scraps of different metal in their stocks. Look at the pictures below what wealth!
Such is the Klondike! Here you will find everything, there are very small scraps, and there are also fairly large pieces of different metal. Such a free repair fund, over time, a lot of such good is collected from welders in garages.
Channel bars, corners, round timber, all this is here, I did not take pictures of good pieces of sheet metal, they are in a separate room, there is poor lighting. Recently welded a toolbox for a MAN truck, the good sheet metal remnants just fit perfectly. Otherwise, you would have to buy 2 new sheets of metal. Stash is power!
And here is the desired find. A piece of 40 stripes and 50 stripes. I will slightly clean the fortieth one by grinding, and after welding, I will cut off the 50 to dimensions of 40.
We remove the old deformed parts of the bracket shelves. We clean out the burrs.
I grab these 2 stripes. I grab them while they are solid, set them exactly in the plane and also grab them together through a piece of the corner, so that after welding they will not be pulled. When I weld them completely, then I cut them to the required size.
Everything is boiled. The seams are tight and beautiful, which means the connection will be strong.
We cut the strips to the required size. We pass all burrs and sharp edges with a grinding disc. The bracket has been repaired. It remains to drill the necessary holes for attachment to the truck frame.
From this article, you might think that welders don't throw anything away at all. No, pieces of scraps, which, according to estimates, will not fit anywhere, can be turned over to ferrous metal. This little thing is in my bucket, I will hand it over the other day, since we have ferrous metal on the territory of the base, from the garage about 100 meters.
When I started welding, a lot of good metal leftovers were turned over to ferrous metal. Then, over time, I began to understand that this is far from ferrous, but the details that may be needed at any time. Well, or buy a new piece at the base for any little thing. According to estimates, I will have a couple of hundred kilograms of different scraps. But this is not an unnecessary ferrous metal, but a necessary stash!