All Purpose P/U

[wroughtn_harv]

Mark,

That old Dodge looks like something I would build, too much is just enough.

Check out the <A target="_blank" HREF=http://photos.yahoo.com/bc/wroughtnharv/lst?.dir=/Truck+stuff+trailer+stuff&.src=ph&.order=&.view=t&.done=http%3a//photos.yahoo.com/bc/wroughtnharv/lst%3f%26.dir=/%26.src=ph%26.view=t>brush fire truck guards and racks</A> I built for a local fire department.

What upsets me is the national association of heads up their butts say that everyone in a fire truck has to be in an approved cab and belted in if the vehicle is moving.

That sounds good.

But think about it. You're dealing with folks who run into burning buildings as everyone else is running out. Do you think for a minute they're gonna sit in the cab while fighting a grass fire? Hell no, they're gonna sit on the tank or lean against the cab with a high pressure hose filling both hands while another heroic personality drives through and over gawd alone know what.

And when they do that they do so at their own risk. No one wants to step up to the plate and accept these men and women are going to do whatever has to be done even at extreme personal risk of life and limb.

Against all conventional wisdom when our fire department got these two grass fire rigs I volunteered to make them these racks for the beds and install their winches.

If you look close you can see where two men can safely stand back there with safety harnesses on fighting the grass fire. They won't get bounced out. There's a foot rail so they won't get slid out. And the rail is of the height that they can lean against it to brace themselves. The only thing I'd add at this date would be roll over protection.

The guys love them.

I looked into maybe marketing them but there's this thing called liability. No one would cover that end. So the only way they get made is when guys like myself figure that the risk of personal fortune to a legal eagle is nothing compared to the risk of life and limb of these heroes. Folks are copying these out in the rural areas where grass fires are a serious threat and the heroes are volunteers.

BTW that front bumper on that Dodge dually I originally made with an over the hood assembly kinda like those that Stinger makes for Hummers. It looked wild. Bud thought it made his strut truck look too wild. He just didn't understand that too much is just enough.

 

[knucklehead]

Thomas

I agree - with both comments. From Jan-April we've dropped and cut 7-8 cords into 4' lengths, dragged it out by hand to the trails where a truck can get, and then cut it into stove length. One month down with a back thing (sciatic nerve - sp?), and now the left knee is a bit gummy from a waltz on a stone wall while dragging brush.

The boss said "Why don't you stop looking for a truck and start looking for a tractor?", after she & the boys hauled ~ 2 cords down from behind the house with a garden cart (warm Winter, as you know) and piled it on pallets (pallets are indespensible), so the grass would grow again around the house.

Since that comment she she hasn't seen me for two weeks. She says this board and my time with dealers may approach on marital infidelity /w3tcompact/icons/wink.gif.

 

[knucklehead]

Beautiful work, W-Harv! Are you using solid round bar for the guards, or tubing? What grade? Your stuff is very fine, looks light and strong - I've looked at a couple gates you did elsewhere on the board. What's the big onion (dome) for on the last page? A mosque? Are the pix at the beginning with the long wheelbase truck your work truck, or was that a job you did for someone else?

I hear ya on the liability thing - there are a bunch of stories out there of things that coulda been........

 

[wroughtn_harv]

The tubing is one inch (1 3/8) schedule forty.

What bothers me is you have these people who don't even think a second about risking their lives for complete strangers. So society makes these rules to protect itself from litigation knowing full well the heroic types are gonna act heroically in spite of the rules. So instead of appreciating this quality in these people and doing our damnedest to make it where when they do what they're gonna do they will have the most security and best equipment possible we wuss out.

I think that attitude is wrong. It's wrong. It's wrong. It's wrong. We only have so many heroes. They are a minority. And when we make the rules instead of the equipment we discourage heroism. It might be my grandchild or yours that is desperate for an act of heroism and there won't be any available.

This is one of my favorite rants. This inate nature toward being heroic is not unlike other folks being inately talented with music or art. Would we stifle them?

Folks forget just what they're dealing with when they are in the presence of these heroes. It would be just as hard or harder for them not to run back into the fire as it would be for me or you to run into it.

Come fire season the news will have picture after picture of volunteer firefighters out fighting grass fires hanging on to flat bed one tons with a two hundred and fifty gallon tanks on the back. And every year we'll get the heart rending stories of someone falling off and getting run over.

We know they are going to risk their lives to fight fires. I just don't see why we don't encourage the production of good equipment so they don't have to die while risking their lives.

Moby is my truck. She's a 97 Chevy ton and a half I bought as a cab and chassis. On the way home from the dealer I stopped by a bud's and we cut out that big old muffler and put in a pair of Flowmasters right behind the cats. She's got a big block and an attitude, the kind I like.

It took me and a helper two weeks to make the bed. In 1997 she won the "Fence Truck of the Year" from World Fence News. She's a sweetheart. And I know it's a she. I looked.

 

[wroughtn_harv]

<font color=blue>What's the big onion (dome) for on the last page?</font color=blue>

A friend believes I can make anything. You never ever intentionally disappoint your friends. I told him I could and then through trial and tribulation we got real lucky.

It was almost worth it for the ride on the crane ball in the little seat. Note the socks to keep from leaving footprints when I put the top piece on.

It's a dome for a Sikh mosque.

Sometimes the simplest complements are the best. After we'd installed it I was standing in the parking lot not really believing I'd actually done it.

This elderly fella with his turban and grey beard came over to me and took my hands and thanked me. He explained that in India and Pakistan the domes are all made by local artisans and each is unique. Here in the U.S. and Canada there are many Sikh temples but they all have the same domes from the same source. He was so glad that their dome was made by a local artisan and unique.

I'll be the first to admit to being one pridefull S.O.B. But that was probably one of those complements that only compare with the time I heard my oldest grandson telling his friend that I was his grandpa from Texas and I could make anything.

 

[knucklehead]

Thanks for the explanation of materials and the dome.

As for the litigation, etc., it has helped me to remember that people that do things that bung up things for others aren't looking to hassle others, because it would require that they be thinking of others. And they aren't - they're thinking about themselves.

 

[ewoss3]

w-Harv since this disscusion has gotten into the bending of pipe I was hoping for some info on sources of good pipe benders(manual) and some relative prices that I should expect to pay for pipe. we have 6 suppliers in my local area and none seem to have a reasonable price for pipe unless you buy in very large quantity. I was planning to do work on the Kubota fops , skid bars for the jeep, overhead rack for the jeep and an operator stand for our spray trailer. I have done plenty of pipe bending(EMT and rigid ) while working for an electrical contractor a few years ago and I really enjoyed the work, but now I want to be able to build on my project vehicles./w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif The expected size pipes that I will be using are 3/4", 1 1/4", and some 2".

I have a portaband, drill press, chopsaw, mig and smoke wrench(also access to a small plasma cutter) for doing assembly, are there any other tool that I should also be getting?

thanks for your help and all the great pictures that you have brought to the board.

 

[wroughtn_harv]

I have a Hossfield with the hydraulic attachment. It's got to be one of the best all around tools for one off fabrication ever brought into this world. This is my third one and I swear I love it as much as a man can love a tool.

You can go to Northern or Tractor supply and get their pipe benders pretty reasonable. The glitch with them is when you have the pipe of the wall thickness where it won't kink you're also at the upper limits of the strength of the castings.

Something real important to keep in mind is that kinking occurs when the material slips.

If you go <A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.planopower.com/store/whipper-clipper.shtml>here</A>. You might notice the nice bends in the square tubing. That is a product I got a patent on umpteen years ago and now my bud produces it. The reason I mention it is I destroyed so much tubing trying to bend it without kinking that the iron tubing gawd probably owns my soul when I die. But there in that factory with all their fancy dancy equipment they're using a variation of the same thing I made all those years ago.

Then one day I figured out how to bend square tubing up to inch and a half fourteen guage down to a radius of about six inches without it kinking. I've been one happy camper ever since. There's been at least one fight that was dirty and nasty and I walked away the winner.

The problem with bending pipe is trying to support the walls while you bend it. Rob Gunter the blacksmith guru does it hot using a couple of rounded edge dies on an anvil. His technique is basically hitting the pipe between two raised points that are rounded so they don't catch the material. It works, saw it with my own eyes.

I was once at a fence company where they'd set up bender for doing thin wall 1 3/8 top rail tubing for gate frames. What they had was a quarter of a wheel about twelve inches in diameter. This cast wheel part had been very carefully ground out so that the tubing would fit in not unlike a die for an emt bender.

This die was welded to a large post that was obviously well supported in a footing. There was an arm coming in of channel on the in side. Attached to this arm was a common pipe vice like plumbers have on the backs of their thrucks.

In the center of this die was pin with two arms that went out and then came together and had a pipe handle for leverage welded on. In between those two arms was a wheel that rolled on the 1 3/8.

The way it worked was you'd put a piece of top rail into the channel and clamp it down with the vise. Your handle with the roller on it would be outside your top rail tubing. You'd pull on the handle and the roller would force the tubing into the die as you walked around it.

This is great if you have one radius and one size tubing like a fence company would have.

I have bent up a couple of roll cages for hobby stock type cars with the Greenlee that is similar to the units Northern and TSC carry. It just takes time and it's real difficult to gauge just where to start to have a set centerline. It's all guesstimating and trial or error.

If you do find a bender and you're looking at a desired measurement center to center here's a little trick I learned the hard way. It's the only way I know to learn anything I guess.

What I've found out is if the radii and degree of bend is exactly the same it's easy to come up with a center to center that will hit each time. By center to center I mean center of material vertically at the start of the bend.

What I do is allow some extra for the legs. Legs can be cut off. Then I mark the desired center to center marks on the tubing or pipe. The only glitch is you can't look at your pipe and then put your marks from the center out unless you have substantial surplus on both ends.

Let's say I'm gonna bend one and a quarter inch square tubing bows for an angle iron trailer I want to make into a stock trailer. I want it to be seventy inches above the top rail of the trailer. I've made up a die that's twelve inches diameter.

I know the desired center to center line for the top rail is seventy nine inches. So I know I need a minimum of two hundred and nineteen inches if all is perfect.

So I start off with a piece two hundred and forty inches, a twenty foot stick. I make a mark at seventy inches starting left to right. Then I make another mark at one hundred and forty nine inches, seventy plus seventy nine.

I place the first mark at a specific place on the die. Usually I go for the start of where the bend will initiate. I pull the bend. Then without removing the tubing from the die I slide it right to left to the next mark. I place that mark at exactly the same place on the die that I placed the first mark. I pull the bend.

I now have a U shaped piece of inch and a quarter square tubing exactly seventy nine inches center to center line of veritcals if the bend is a ninety. The legs are long. But it's much easier to shorten them than it is to extend them.

You can do the same with round stuff. And if you think about it for a minute the whole secret is if you start something here and then exactly so far away you repeat the event they will be center to center the exact same measurement at any point in that corresponding event.

It just took a whole bunch of ruined pipe and tubing to figure that little simple rule out. Like I said, I seemed to be destined to learn things the hard way.

 

[bgott]

http://209.238.153.119/benderFAQ.html

 

[bgott]

Maybe this link is a little better...http://209.238.153.119/benders.html