I swear it's a total fabrication!

[unixronin]

"It" being the LATCh system lower child-seat anchors which I just retrofitted into our car.  They're not available as a retrofit kit, so I had to fabricate them from 1.25"x0.25" steel strip and 0.25" stainless-steel rod.  I find it amusing that by far the most difficult and time-consuming part of the entire job was finding the damned materials....

Oh, and my welding-fu increaseth.  All but one or two of the sixteen required welds went pretty much perfectly the first time.

(Of course, the goddamned mosquitoes almost ate me alive ... I probably killed fifteen or twenty mosquitoes on me.  As soon as I got out to the garage I was surrounded by a cloud of the damned things.  I was fighting them off with a methylacetylene torch at one point.)

---

By the way, it's bloody ridiculous when you're grinding your welds flush and you can't see what you're doing properly because there are puddles of sweat in your safety glasses.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

methylacetylene? *roots around and figures out what that should look like.... * Waitaminit, doesn't that just flip over and become propane?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Technically methylacetylene-propiadene, aka MAPP gas, aka "banana gas" because it normally comes in yellow bottles. And no, it doesn't just restructure to propane. Useful stuff; it burns a lot hotter than propane, but doesn't require the expensive regulators, tanks etc. of a full oxy-acetylene rig.

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

You're not TIG welding that stainless? That's not good.

-Ogre

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The torch was just for hot-forging the stainless rod into the required double-L shape. The welding was done with a Miller wirefeed MIG machine.

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

But what feed wire are you using in the MIG unit? If you're using non-stainless wire you're likely significantly weakening your piece.

-Ogre

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I don't know the composition of the wire in the machine, except that it's not stainless; unfortunately, neither do I have a choice. Likewise I don't have a choice about the gas -- CO₂, "because it's cheap." If it was my choice it'd be stainless and argon.

Nevertheless, I intentionally over-engineered to be safe.... I have pretty good confidence that the snap hooks on the anchor straps, or the seats themselves, will fail well before my anchors do. The seat belt brackets and the like are about 3/32" steel.