Saturday and Sunday I worked on Ti bars, trying to get them out to folks before the guy in the big red suit shows up.

Titanium takes longer to work with, as the material demands a meticulous process, insuring cleanliness and precision. As I do bars in batches, one step that I take to insure that the tubing is ready when I am is to bag all my parts after they've been cleaned and prepped with Scotchbright, limiting atmospheric contamination and dust niblets that float around.

Once out of the bag, they get another quick rub with the Scotchbright to knock off any oxidation, an acetone bath, then purged and tacked up. Here's a bar getting it's final purge before welding. How long do I purge for? I try to allow for the calculated interior space to be replaced with argon by a factor of three...about 5 minutes per bar at 6cfm does it for me. Once filled, I knock the flow back to a maintenance rate to keep up with leakage out the miters.

Each bar takes me about 35 minutes for welding, alignment and inspection once all the dead time is factored in. Mid afternoon Sunday and here's what I've gotten done today... 10 more bars to go before tomorrow morning :)

Gonna have to run to Canton in the morning to pick up some new ceramic nozzles for the blast cabinet then I'll get these glass beaded, rubbed out, and off to their new homes.

cheers,

rody