Mag Drill

[pat h]

Ya. I've drilled lots of holes in heavy plate and have never removed mill scale purposely prior to drilling.

Me either, once 360 on 1/2 plate

[sledsports]

I borrowed an old Milwaukee 4297 a few months ago from a friend who has a fab shop that makes pope beveling machines, it was big and bad and worked like a champ. Can't speak for the new ones.

I have a hougen 904 and it's a solid machine. I wish I had spent a few more dollars and got the 904S...has a swivel base.

Another friend of mine has a dewalt, no idea the model, and he loves it. He borrowed my hougen once, that was before he got the dewalt. He said he likes the dewalt better. I think he's a jerk.

Sounds one of those "my stuff is better than yours" kinda guys. Maybe he has little man syndrome?

[ryanjones2150]

Maybe, but I think he's just jealous that mine is a bad mammerjammer and his is yellow.

[Oldgrandad]

Well since this is a welding web site thought I might put some welding in here. After drilling those hole its time for the base plates and caps to get welded. Had one of my kids here make a jig to align the base plates. Really funny watching the smoke come out of his ears, after a short time of heavy thinking he came up with a nice little jig that works great. As of today we have 12 poles done and inspected. We are using .045 flux core and 3 passes to get the 3/8" weld required.

[Oldgrandad]

I don't want any surprises, so I check the size of the weld after the second and third pass to be sure it's right. Pic #4 is the cap

[Ltbadd]

looks real good, always glad to see a project being finished and done right, and a happy customer

[snoeproe]

A quick tip for aligning your base plates. The Ironworkers use a technique called marking centres. With a sharp soap stone, mark centre lines on your columns or posts, then mark centre lines on your base plates, align the centre lines with one another (all 4 sides), tack and weld.

[Oldgrandad]

That is a great tip for aligning parts to each other we use it a lot around here but with so many parts we made jig (time well spent) and I don't need to mark anything just clamp and go. I do double check that the plates are square with the tube with a level. So far they have all been dead on. Jig is doing its job.