ABBABIBBLE'S New kick-awesome BC wheel

Unicycles and Equipment
1

Ok. I’ve been building my BC plates over the last month or so, and i finally got all the pieces together and was able to get the last part i needed today. I finished my bc, but i have to go to work in about 20 minutes, so i haven’t really practiced yet.

pics:
http://unicyclist.com/gallery/?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_itemId=168008
I used the same wheel as catboy’s (only cause i found it on ebay for a decent price, and it looked sweet) and i made my own plates. I modified evan’s concept, and they’re shorter than long plates, but longer than shorts. I like to call them CHANGED BECAUSE OF LOOSE to Abbaplates plates.

2

Shlong plates?

Looking good dude, hope u have fun, I might need to get a BC eventually.

Loose.

3

verrry funny. not shlong… maybe i should change the name… i dunno.
maybe i’ll just call them Abbaplates. yeah. that’ll do it.

4

i like shlong plates. that’s awesome.

5

Unfortunately taken, specifically as the bulletproof ceramic plates in Anti-Bullet-Body-Armour.

Shlong it must be…

Loose.

6

Heres my 2 http://www.unicyclist.com/gallery/?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_itemId=167980 I got both for free. (Courtesy of my uncle and his bike shop). I was just out practicing and got extremely bad tire tears on the inside of my legs. OUCH!

7

i hope they dont bend on ya…

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if they do, i’ll just get stronger metal. This is just for learning, and i don’t intend on any extremely extreme stuff anytime soon.

9

WHAT THE F***

Those are the absolute worst welds I have ever seen. I like that you tried to make your own plates but im guessing one smack with a hammer those plates will fall apart like a card tower. also having in between long and short is pointless, long only works if you can get your toe or ball of foot and your heal on it to tilt for balance.

Those welds will nto hold to anything. Those welds will probably be around the strength of a set up tack weld.

10

Thanks evan. Thanks a bunch. :angry:
The welds are sloppy, i admit that. But you seriously need to watch where you’re treading and how you talk to people. That just cost you a lifetime’s worth of trust right there. Never again, evan. Never again. You just lost another ally. This was my first really large welding project, and you just tried to quash my enthusiasm for getting better. Nice way to try to build yourself up, it’s really original. And i’m not even going to give you bad rep. You don’t even deserve that.

On a happier note, my second set of plates are in the design phase and there’s nothing evan and his pessimistic self can do about it. :smiley:

11

Those welds are pretty bad…

It looks really weak at the intersection near the bolt.

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If you had researched it at all, you would have made the angled vertical tubes meet at the axle or above, instead of putting them below which takes away a lot of strength and rigidness.

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yup. they aren’t my best welds ever, i have to admit. BUT it’s more reason to make more for practice! :smiley:

and evan, i don’t want you in this thread anymore. go away, please. you are now on my ignore list.

14

Much, much, much, much, much, MUCH more practice!:smiley:

15

Evan slow down…

But yeah, you’re right.

Next time, try turning on the sheilding gas for those welds. Either that or use flux cored wire (meaning you can only do MIG, not TIG). Also, well, do everything completely differently. You made the apex of the triangle meet virtually below the axle. This means the weakest part of the plate is in the part getting the most stress. Even if your welds were good (which they aren’t, sorry), those would be weak plates because of the aforementioned design flaw.

On top of the welds, the plates reek of heat distortion. Welding is nothing like gluing. By making a weld, you distort the metal, no way around it. It appears that no effort was made to account for that (notice the crazy warpage in the first pic of the BC wheel). Next time, be strategic with your welds. Don’t just weld one seam and go to the next: Instead, tack the whole thing together (using as little heat as possible. This means you will have to be agressive with the TIG pedal). Then, once you get it tacked together, do the welds strategically, checking alignment and squareness along the way.

Really, you should have a professional welder to look over your shoulder. He or she would have stopped you in a second when you made welds like that, because, well, it should be obvious that you need sheilding gas. Keep up the learning, but please, do more research and find someone to teach you. Having access to welding equipment doesn’t mean you can just sit down and spit out usable metal projects.

One last thing: What welding proccess are you using? MIG, TIG, or Stick? I assume you’re doing mig, because TIG is impossible with all the smoke when the sheilding gas is off.

16

actually, i did use flux-cored wire…
maybe i have my settings turned up too high…
thanks for the advice.
But yeah… i’m still quite proud that i actually accomplished something because all of my other large(ish) scale projects have either failed absolutely miserably, or just not been started off paper. I’m proud of the fact that i actually carried through on my project and finished it for once, and it doesn’t work half bad.

I’ll tell you that the axle washer things weren’t of my original plan.
After i finished my base thing, i realised that the 3" is a lot smaller than i thought (that’s the height of the triangle). So i ended up putting on those on the tip of the triagle instead of inside like i originally planned.

my next set, now that i have experience (sort of…) will hopefully be more thought out and clean.

17

Alright, with a bit more info to play with:

Disclaimer: I’m not going to claim everything here is 100% accurate. I’m not a professional welder, I’m just trying to share what I’ve learned working in a metal shop. I’ve been through exactly what you’re going through, and am trying to help. For example, i approached my first unicycle frame thinking it’d take 2 weeks to machine. It took 6 months. I spent 2 months just revising the drawings before the guy teaching me even let me touch my metal. So with that said:

This has nothing to do with you, but flux cored wire sucks. Period. It has uses, namely when you have two flat piece of 1/4" mild steel that want to be attached. It is an excercise in futility to use flux cored wire on structural steel such as bike tubing.

If you insist on not buying a regulator and renting a tank of argon, here’s a hint: flux cored wire makes slag. You can’t lay another pass or do more welding on top of a previous weld until you chip off the slag. WEAR EYE PROTECTION FOR THIS.

On another note, MIG is not the ideal proccess for this stuff. If I were you I would either A: invest in a good TIG welding rig (meaning Hobart, Miller, or Lincoln, not some generic ebay crap), or B: invest in a good (meaning not Harbor Freight) set of oxy-actylene regulators and torches. Rent some tanks, and learn oxy-actylene welding.

MIG isn’t really precise enough for welds like this. If we had to make those at work, we would whip out the TIG welder (well, not literally). If the tig welder were broken, we’d get the oxy-acetylene rig. If the oxy-acetylene rig were broken, we would send the customer somewhere else. Note, the shop at work has 4 MIG welders.

If you want to do good work making unicycle parts, you really need to become proficient with an O/A welder and a TIG welder.

By saying “your settings are too high” you show that you aren’t yet familiar with you MIG welder. What do you mean by “settings”? There’s wire feed, amperage, wire guage, arc length, method of deposition (spray or globular), polarity, speed of welding, and wire extension to be worried about here. This mess gets even worse when you use a sheilding gas. Let me repeat, you need someone who does this junk professionally to teach you. Can you enroll at a local community college? Do something like that, because it’s dangerous and foolish of you to just pick up a MIG welding gun and start laying down pools of molten metal. Again, I’m not trying to stomp on your hopes of making something useful, but you have gotten way ahead of yourself.

EDIT: As for the axle washers, well, this exposes another thing you need to become proficient with, although less so for welding. You need to have an idea of what measurements translate to, and what they mean to your design. You can’t just arbitrarily change the design like you did, and expect to have something useful come out. By lowering the position of the plates the way you did, you made them too weak to be useful.

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We do have a community college, but they have absolutely no hands on stuff. I’m thinking that i’ll do some more reading up on this stuff before i try again. Also, i think i may be able to get an attachment that lets me use a shielding gas and solid wire.
And you did hit that nail strait on the head there gerble. I’m not too familiar with my machine… I just go by the chart on the side that has the settings and what metal thickness to use with which combination of settings. I think my amperage is too high for the metal i’m using, but i’m not sure.
Anyways, thanks for the info. On monday i’m off to the librorry and local welding shop as to learn more…

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Good. Remember, though, reading helps, but you will still need a human there to help you along the way.

As for the CC, that’s a shame. You might want to look again, however, because trades are a big deal at most CC’s. The none near my house has at least 5 welding classes and even mroe machining classes. I believe the most expensive one is like $100 for a semester class.

20

huh.
maybe i’ll check by there again.
and maybe even reno… there’s gotta be something there.