Work Project help!!

Nelly23

I am doing a small project at work that I could do with some advice. Its my first engineering job so its all new to me! THe company I work for fabricates 'I' and 'H' beams with steel. The problem we have is that when we get the steel in and profile it to the required length/widths we need to clean the limescale of the plates to get an earth for the weldings. The whole plate does is not required to be cleaned, just a 25-80mm strip in the middle of the flanges and 10-30mm strips on the sides of the web.

This is the most time consuming part of the whole welding process and needs to be improved as we are getting very busy! We are currently using a sanding belt on a push bike like assembly (very hard to explain in words) which is very inefficient! This does a good cleaning job but is extremely time consuming!

I have been given the task to design a new rig and use a better cleaning tool but am finding it tough. I was looking into chemical cleaning butnot getting much look there either!

Any help would be greatly apprecited! If I havent explained things well enough please let me know and I can go into more detail.

Cheers!

sham08

Why does your company not shot blast the steel before welding, that is how it is commonly done and it is necessary before painting to avoid spalling and overall protection of the steel.

fishdog

Simple, use an angle grinder. Alternatevily if that is too abrasive, you can put a wire brush type head onto a drill.