[thx11389793]

fabrication, welding, juggling, playing music, working on and riding motorcycles, doing acid in the woods.

it takes some doing but it's well worth the effort to move your leisure time away from device-focused activities. the sense of life balance gained is palpable.

[rorykoehler]

We have sort of overlapping interests haha. How did you learn to weld? Any advice on getting started? It's been in the back of my mind for a few years now. Would love to get started but have no idea where/how to start.

[thx11389793]

MrLeap did a great job explaining this. If I were to add anything, it would be to echo the recommendation to take a class if you're really starting from nothing. Two things are really important starting out: someone who can demonstrate good technique and rapidly evaluate and give feedback on your work, and seat time. It's like learning to write, once you know what you want the result to look like, it's mostly time in the seat to build consistency and muscle memory. If you have the time, I've heard good things about community college courses. Here in Oakland, Ca, there's an industrial arts space, The Crucible, that offers condensed courses, useful if you're short on time.

I had the great fortune of working adjacent to a machine shop. I learned TIG on a work machine. A co-worker spent 15 minutes showing me setup and some example welds, then it was mostly seat time from there, with lots of YouTube and a couple of "hey, how's my weld look?" sessions.

Actually fabricating stuff can be an issue when you don't have machine shop at your disposal. Luckily, some metal shops have a CNC laser or plasma, so if you design something in CAD, you can shop out sheet metal bits and avoid the hassle. There are places that will laser cut and notch steel or alu tube so that you can sort of just hand-bend and lego your workpiece together.

One tool that's not obvious, but becomes indispensable especially to a homegamer is a portable bandsaw. Get a decent corded one-- it makes cutting tube stock etc accurate and fast. You can fabricate a stand for it and turn it into a static bandsaw as well.

[MrLeap]

I'm not the guy above, but my "unwind" hobbies are all metalworking related (silversmithing / blacksmithing are my primary, but if I can ever save the money up for a bridge-port i'll be doing a lot more welding... So, I'll give you my unsolicited advice!

You've got 3 major types of welding you can learn (I'm going to skip torch welding, most people on HN can't keep a 45 in. tank of acetylene in their 4500$ a month studio apartments. ;D)

Stick welding - this is like the "low level language" of welding. Lots of greybeards recommend it to start with because if you suffer through getting good at it, you'll breeze through all the other weld types. The rig is also the cheapest way to start. You hold some plastic and copper salad tongs with a stick that looks like a sparkler in it. Then you spend ~20 hours trying to strike an arc on steel to get the stick melting without getting your stick stuck. It's a pain in the ass. If your primary goal is gaining non-developer related expertise through practice, get yourself a stick welder, I guess. If you goal is to affix two pieces of metal together, and you don't necessarily want to find a mentor or take a class, ehhh.. I'd skip it.

Mig Welding - The batteries included, jQuery of welding. Greybeards and enthusiasts will often guffaw at it, saying it ruins you as a welder (sound familiar?) while still owning one and using it whenever they put a trailer together. Instead of holding a stick you hold something that looks like a gas pump that feeds wire from a spool in the machine. You pull the trigger on the pump and wire comes out and gets all sparky. Oxygen is the enemy of good welds so you've got two subtype solutions to deal with this: flux core wire and gas. Flux core welds tend to look dirtier, but it's fewer categories of consumables to work with. Get the argon if you want to maintain some level of street cred with the "real" welders. 99% of welders are terrified about being excommunicated from the church of welding by real welders. The last 1% just want to go home and think only of retirement. If you just want to buy a thing and stick metal together, get a Mig welder and some spools of flux core. Also get an angle grinder, because your welds are going to be covered in flux crap. When you get tired of grinding, graduate to shield gas. Most good machines support both.

Tig Welding - This is the cool kid welder. You hold something that looks like it's straight out of a dentist's catalog. It's got a tungsten pencil tip inside a cup. Tungsten gets real hot cup directs shield gas around tungsten, you hold filler rod in your other hand. Filler rod, tig welder, and workpiece meet in a symphony of UV light, stacked dimes and magic. Tig welders are like distributed, containerized microservice developers. Their rigs accrete complication as time goes on. They get foot pedals to control amperage, whammy bars to add that rock flavor, flight sticks they can't even use because their hands are full. It's like spinning plates while chewing bubblegum. If you'd like to be able to turn filler rod into a Norman Rockwell painting, get a tig welder and take a class.

Torch welding. - Okay I've typed this much. Replace the fancy tig torch rig with an acetylene gas torch. Get this setup if you'd like to build a battleship in your backyard.

Here's the one thing that really does piss off the grey-beard welders worth listening to: do not endanger people by doing welds a professional should be doing. Say you get your steal-me-red lincoln electric and you get pretty good at it over a few weekends. Say you even make a nice bird house with it.

Do _NOT_ weld your neighbor's bisected lawnmower blade back together no matter how much he asks you to. Your weld will fail and he will lose his foot. Do _NOT_ weld your neighbor kid's swingset back together. The weld will fail and a kid will end up in the ER. The kid's parents will come find you and try to beat you up. Latch come off someone's chain link fence? Go ahead and weld that if you want. Basically just get a professional involved if a failed weld means injury / death.

[wallflower]

Thanks for the descriptions! Not the OP. You have a real nack for artful and sociological spelunkers writing. It reminds me of Tom Wolfe.

[MrLeap]

Why thank you! I've received enough social validation for my writing recently that I'm making a token effort to start publishing things on my website in my profile. If you have a moment maybe check out my first entry! If access logs were where NearlyFreeSpeech said they'd be, your visit would be the fuel to keep me publishing.

Since they aren't, fantasizing about all the traffic I must be getting is enough.

[wallflower]

I read your first blog about information asynchrony. Brilliant. And what you were teaching/explaining not what I expected to read after the first couple sentences. Please keep on writing. It reminds me of Steve Blank.

[8_hours_ago]

> fantasizing about all the traffic I must be getting

I don't know if I should support such a vain activity, I read your first entry and I enjoyed it! If you haven't figured out the logs yet, you can add 1 to your manual hit counter.

[rorykoehler]

Thanks for the descriptions. I’d read up on them previously but your reply gave way more context. I’d like to build bicycles and things with wheels in general but i’ll take your advice re injury/death potential. If I understood correctly I should do a class and that’s pretty much the only way to learn besides doing it on the job with a mentor?

[MrLeap]

The most important thing a class will teach you is a critical eye for weld quality. An oft repeated standard for pro-welders is that when your work piece is stressed to failure, it fails someplace different than where you weldeded it - the point being that your welds are stronger than the materials you combined.

A real high octane class might teach you how to read a phase diagram for different kinds of steels, how to normalize / quench harden / anneal and temper your work to achieve desired properties after you take off your hood. There's a lot decisions and knowledge that go into being safe at industry standards.

From a practical standpoint, I'm not a professional welder. If I can wack the workpieces as hard as I can against my driveway with no visible changes in my welds, I'll risk my nuts on a bike of my construct. The unforgivable sin is making that choice for _other_ people. So, until the Grand Vizier at the Local 10' gives you your welder's badge and gun, don't donate your bespoke, all natural, cage free bikes to the local ride-share.

Youtube, concentration, and a bit of perseverance can totally learn you enough to safely endanger yourself though!