Paint cart

[Mudhen]

When I was painting the hood on the '05 last year I came to the realization that I had no place to clean my paint gun, etc...I was sitting on the floor pouring thinner into my oil change bucket and it sucked.  I have a strange looking (although very heavy duty) cart/table sort of thing a neighbor gave me last year that was bordering on useless (but I had to have it when he offered it), so I thought I might try to fab up something.  I suck at fab work so I like to do it for the practice...but square corners, nice welds, etc usually elude me...practice makes better!

Here's the cart - I'd added that little 2x4 base for the drain bucket before I remembered a camera:


I had a sheet of stainless steel from some motorcycle exhaust can brackets I made a thousand years ago...so I squared it up and bent it to make a sink:


Then I welded the corners up...but the question became, how do I hold the stainless steel to the aluminum table top?  I ended up welding some tabs to the bottom and just bending them around the lip - plus that way it isn't permanent, I can slide the sink off the end if needed.  I also found a sink drain in the basement leftover from when we were building our house, so I cutout a hole for it, too:



Another thing I'm always doing is chasing paper towels around the floor...so I grabbed a piece of 1" tubing that was laying around and welded it to the side (guess it makes the cart look VERY excited to be getting used again  ;D):


Awhile back I bought a beader from Eastwood - haven't had a chance to try it out, so thought I might use it on the base of the drain bucket holder:


I found that it was impossible to do by myself and get even close to straight beads; grabbed one of the kids to do the cranking while I fed the metal.


I made some sides for it and welded it to the base on the cart.  I tried and tried to weld it with the TIG, which is what I always grab first just for practice...but no way could I get a weld on the .22ga steel with my 250amp Dialarc, it just burned holes no matter how much I dialed it back.  Had to use my MIG instead.


Now I just needed to make the table top bigger and put some sides on it to keep little parts from falling off.  I had a 4x8 sheet of 1/8" aluminum - thought I might weld it to the current top but really liked the 'tab' thing so I could slide it off if I wanted to...


Keeping the sides square was a pain since my magnets wouldn't work - but I managed to use them with clamps to keep everything square for welding:


I had a major ooops on this side, though - I must have used way too much heat and had some sort of side load on it - fk!


Welded it back together, though - wasn't going to cut another piece out for this stupid thing.  I don't play golf, but from what I hear I think it must be like TIG welding - I'll put down a few inches of weld that looks absolutely perfect...and then the next section is all f'kd up.  Not sure I'll ever really get it, thankfully one of my next things is just the roll cage...anyone want to co-drive for me?   :D

I still need to paint the base and figure out a way to seal the drain - I guess it's designed to seal up on a 2" thick counter, not a 1/8" piece of metal.  I tried welding the rim of it but it must not be stainless because I couldn't get it to stick.  Now I'm wondering about some sort of gas tank sealer/epoxy - assume that would hold up to thinner.



As you can see in the pics I need to figure out the warpage issue...if I should be locking down the sheets somehow to keep them from twisting up, or maybe just do very small welds and let it cool.  Man it takes a crap load of heat to weld that thick of aluminum - I upgraded my Dialarc to a Syncrowave and got a water cooled torch instead of my air cooled one - but I still could only weld 2-3 inches at a time before my hands would be burning off... :(

[94touring]

Wow that's slick.  I just pour into an old can or dump in the dirt lol.

[Mudhen]

So I had a little problem...I bought a big roll of masking paper and it was kicking around the garage, falling over all the time and I was afraid the 4yo would get killed under it.  I had some 1" pipe from another project that I thought would go inside the tube, but it was exactly the same size...wasn't going to work.

When I looked at the paint cart, though, there was a lot of available real estate underneath the top:



My thought was to make up some sort of 'slip roll' type of set up.  So I started out by welding a 2x4 piece of steel to the main cart support.  Then levelled/squared 2 pieces of the 1" pipe just a little wider than the paper roll to it:



Under those I welded on a piece of 1.75" rollcage tubing for the roll to sit on top of:



Then I put a couple pieces of PVC over the steel for the 'rolling'...





Bazinga!