Hey good people - welding stuff first, as its driving me nuts........

My welding is getting reasonable, the welds don't break when I hit
them with a 5lb hammer. Slag (usually) chips off in one piece with
minimal effort. I reckon thats pretty acceptable - know bugger all
about stress engineering, so I cross brace everything I am going to
stand on 20ft up in the air so if 1 or 2 break, I don't go whoops....

Question - I finally used up a box of "El Cheapo" Chinese rods. Was
doing alright with them. Decided to damn the expense, and bought 2.5Kg
of "MUREX" GP rods. Their bloody awful - splutter, wont hold an arc,
hard to strike an arc, stick to the job. Thought it might be they had
gone hygroscopic, even though it was a sealed in plastic pack. So kept
em warm (on top of the PC monitor) for about a week now. Still weld
crap. Slightly better (but still crappy) results if I crank up the
current to 80 amps, the previous ones ran fine on 65 amps. So, what
gives - tonight, I got really ****ed off and rummaged through the
junkbox and found 2 CIG 'Satincraft" rods that had been sitting in a
damp garden shed for years, they welded real good. Lashed out a while
ago and bought a little DC inverter welder and a LCD helmet -
wonderful inventions, both of them. Highly recommended.

Any explanations on whats going on and how I fix it, or do I just bin
them and buy some more Chinese ones.....saw some at the markets on
Sunday, $4.50 for 2.5Kg - sounds too cheap to be anything but junk,
but I don't know. Tempted to buy some jsut to stuff around....

Another welding question - I am OK at horizontal welding, but this
limits what I can do - some things are just not able to be maneuvered
around to get this alignment. Vertical welding is a problem - is there
a "recommended" way, ie bottom of weld UP or from top DOWN. Molten rod
tends to flow and bugger up what you haven't welded....

And another....welding galvanized pipe/tube. If I grind off the gal,
welds like ordinary steel (yes, I know thats blatantly obvious) - if I
leave the gal coating on, get a yellowish fumes, and a white, cotton
like deposition on the surfaces,- is this a BAD THING or not?.....

And and and.........finally found out what a "Dead Blow" hammer is
USED for - people here had kindly explained what it was, but last week
in Milling class was shown how to use it - used for setting job in
vice as it doesn't bounce and so the job doesn't recoil either....

And I must read the bloody manual for the DRO on the Bridgeport mill -
was getting hopelessly confused on trying to mill to a length until I
figured out you had to factor in the diameter of the cutting tool...at
both ends of the cut.....dunno about you lot, but getting increasingly
reluctant to spend YONKS trying to read long complicated instructions
- it was easy to do it by eye to the witness marks, and check with the
micrometer as I got close. Figured out how to zero the thing and do
small increments via the DRO. Plus, the instructors turned the power
off at break time, so any readings on the DRO went back to zero at
power on.....Bugger .....

And milling machines are a pig to clean down after use - they generate
so many chips, and with coolant flooding a job, is messy as all hell.
Have to factor in extra time at the end of the day to do it, so loose
valuable "machining out of tolerance" time.....and those rubber
concertina guards over the table, best chip catchers ever invented I
reckon....

and and and.....can anyone out there can point me to plans (free) for
a SIMPLE flat bar bender - got some "honey do" projects, - (I thin
kit was Don Foreman who coined that phrase - very useful and
descriptive for the household projects) the ones I have seen have
been too complicated for a novice like me, they are adjustable for
different sizes of bar, either by different size dies or cam
adjustments - I am happy to make it "one size only" for the few things
I want to make...

regards,

Andrew VK3BFA.