Metalworking project updates

Ok, so here it is after a bit longer of a delay than I had anticipated, but I have finally made enough progress on my base metalworking project that I can start work, and soliciting feedback, on all the daughter projects. Last fall I built this:

No, not the tractor, the pointy bits attached to the front of it. That, dear readers, is a Concord grape pre-pruner. The business end is a repurposed hay sickle, made to run off a salvaged hydraulic motor with a homemade crankshaft/gearbox to make the blades reciprocate. It's attached to the front frame of my Kubota with a 3-axis (X, Y, Tilt) tool carrier I also built as my first-time welding/fabrication project. I used it this spring to prune 50 acres of Concord grapes on my family farm in a fraction of the time it used to take doing it by hand. There were quite a few bugs I had to deal with along the way, making it slower-going than it would have been error-free, but either way it's a major improvement from the previous prototype:

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Do you know what foxxxyben is doing to our soil?

Cross-posted to a fistful of farming, metalworking, and engineering communities, by way of introduction.

Hi! My name is Ben. My family owns a small vineyard in eastern Washington State. I am in charge of several projects, including the daily operation and ongoing upgrades/rehabilitation of a 50-acre Concord grape block that we are in the process of getting organic certification. Three years ago, I was severely burned when I fell into a concealed hazardous waste dump site the previous owners had illegally buried on the property, so I am also interested in developing new waste recycling technologies and projects. I haven't posted regularly to LJ for quite a long time now, and although I've found a few more specialized message boards off-site, my needs and interests now overlap with so many different fields, so I've decided to knock the dust off my account and send out some feelers in all directions.

Last year I came to the conclusion that from here out all of my equipment needs to be custom-made, and my local shops aren't quite up to the task of doing any kind of R&D, so I broke down and bought the Harbor Fright starter kit, and have been rallying hard since last September to churn out my first big project -- a hydraulic sickle mower mounted to a custom 3-axis vertical tool carrier on the front of my Kubota -- to get a leap on pruning earlier this year. I never took shop in high school, and considering my total lack of experience I'd say it was an overall success (I got the entire field pruned nearly 2 1/2 months earlier than previous years of using sucky hedging shears), although there are some considerable alterations I need to make to both the pruner and my workshop.

So, now that I'm not quite so under the gun with that particular project, I figured I'd take the time to join some new communities, introduce myself, and solicit some help finding some good machinist groups that have nothing to do with Christian Bale. I've got several other ongoing builds and field projects I'm going to post some entires on in the next few weeks as I have some downtime when the vines start to bud out. In the meantime, the biggest problem I've had with my pruner is the kludgey reciprocator crankshaft I welded together literally out of scrap gears and bolts -- I desperately need advice on turning and heat hardening, and can't find any active lathe-working communities. My next shop project is to build an Arduino-driven dividing head to turn out a new crank in my drill/mill, but I already let the blue smoke out of my first Uno, so some computer and electrical engineering help would be, well, helpful. Finally, since I'm trying to find a use for all this dead vine material I'm chipping and bagging (another post) and I have both a need for medium-sized metal casting and a growing pile of scrap metal, I think I'd really like to build a wood-gasifier forge slash meat cookerizer so I can throw some of the most metal BBQs in town. Unfortunately, most of the metal casting communities I've found are for jewelry making, so if anyone can point me towards something a little more industrial, that'd be great.

Anyways, I'll be posting more entries later or sooner to introduce some of the individual projects I've got lined up. I'll try my best to keep them organized separately, although they do all converge together on a common larger purpose, which hopefully will make sense as I go along. Thanks for reading!

-Ben

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friction welding
Does anybody knows what nickel super alloys can be welded using friction welding. I need links to the articles and pictures of welded details. 

Thanks. 

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I have a TIG, a Lincoln SquareWave175. It's lovely. I have the original torch and cable. The cable's not very flexible, and the torch is getting pretty worn -- a bit melted on one side from previous owner welding 3/8" aluminum, generally just beat-up. I'm not welding for a living, but I'm doing a *lot* of art welding: sink pedestals, wine racks, stuff like that, maybe an average of an hour a day. I'm looking at starting to do structural/safety hazard stuff: primary welds on bike frames, car frames, some day an airplane. Before I do the car or airplane I'll get certified, but in the meantime I'm wondering about upgrading equipment/materials, and am looking for suggestions/recommendations.

Vacuum-melted filler rod: enough better than standard name-brand welding rod with the copper stripped off? If so, where can I get it? I ask because Richard Finch, the guy who wrote all those welding books, says it's The Thing, but I can't find anywhere that actually sells it.

Ultra-flexible cable to replace the existing torch cable? Flex-head torch? Water-cooled? It's my understanding that water-cooling would help if I were running really thick welds on really thick metal, but my welder's only rated for like 60% duty cycle at over 130 amps -- and besides, all the stuff I do is thin tubing and I can't remember the last time I had it over 100amps. So is there any point to upgrading equipment? or should I just get a reasonable mid-range standard torch handle to replace my melted and cracked one?

Any good books to read beside Finch's welding stuff and the FAA/NTSB aviation welding guidelines?

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Job
I desparatly need a job. I took welding for two years at my high school, but now that i am out nad graduated, i have no idea what to do. can anybody help me?

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MIG Welding Question
I am currently working to build a 2 wheeled hand powered bicycle since I have really messed up knees. There is just one vital weld and that is connecting the stem (that normally would clamp the handlebars) to a seat tube that leads to the bottom bracket and crank arms.

Anyways, what you might be able to help me with is my friends MIG welding technique. He ended up getting really convex beads. I suggested going a little hotter but my friend says when he tried that, he ended up melting the tubes we were trying to join. Would going slower with the beads at a slightly lower temperature allow for the wire to really melt and fuse on to the tubes without burning holes in them? The only other thing he may have skipped was really cleaning off all the paint, rust, and oil on the frame tubes.

Hope you can help!

-Mario

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Hi guys,
could you recommend a web resource with the good arc welding projects, easy enough for beginners?

And one more problem: it could be nice to expand our community and involve new members. What could you offer?

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