Moving on to stainless I started with prep, figured it would be easier now than later, and would make any markings I made clear and easy to read.
I started with cutting my sch 40 1.5" pipe into 6" lengths
Then I wire wheeled them to get the s*** off them, cant remember what its called, but is an important step prior to welding. A little bit of love game me this:
At this point Im ready to start measuring out my angles. In a perfect world using a perfect cutting tool, you would mark 0 on the pipe, and then measure 90 degrees from there to make your second cut. Because this is reality, I measure to 93-4 degrees to make my second cut to account for blade deflection. Could have used a protractor, but had this angle finder laying around so used it to mark my angles on the pipe.
put the pipe in my jig and made a few cuts to get me this:
As you can see came out alright except that each cut I made, near the end because of blade deflection the blade would basically curve away from the pipe and not cut straight down like its supposed to. This gave me a lot of grief trying to achieve fitup and wasnt apparent with the PVC pipe because the plastic was much much softer and gave me less deflection. If I had to do it again, I would use a different cutting method. This was quick, but left me lots to grind down, so didnt save me much time compared to using a slow cutting bandsaw. Also the chop saw left alot of s*** hanging off the edges that needed to be cleaned up before welding, I recommend you use a carbide tool or dremel to zip all that off to have nice clean edges.
Some more cutting and measuring, and cleaning up with the carbide gave me this:
At this point the pieces have all been grinded down to get the best fitup I could manage. I decided to start tacking them together. For some reason the middle piece is much shorter then the adjoining pieces, I ended up having to chop down the length so that all 3 would be able to fit up nicely.
Threw some good strong tacks on there to make sure they wouldnt come apart. This ended up pulling them closer on the outside, and causing gaps on the inside where they meet so will have to somehow squeeze them together to put a tack on the inside so they stay lined up for final welding. Hope to have them fully welded tomorrow. Unsure if I will be doing 1 pass or 2 to get full penetration.
