Welding Tips and Tricks

We have to replace a dump bed hoist for a friend of mine on his work truck. I needed a good way to support the dump bed so I built some stands to hold up the bed. These are a copy of a commercially available stand that we made for ourselves.

I drew up a rough sketch and figured my angles first. I cut the slots into the tubing using our CNC plasma table and a piece of plate as a stop. Having a laser locator lets you really line up stuff like this.



I already had some 1x2" bar with a hole and a radius on one end to act as a pivot for the top plates. Welded these up with my TIG machine.



Next,I jigged the pieces up on my table and tacked them all together.



Speaking of the jig table, sometimes it just really handy for holding that piece in a good position to weld. It made getting into the tight angle a fairly easy.



I cut out these tabs from 1/2 plate and welded them to a piece of C channel to make the top pivot plates.



Closeup of the weld. I'd like to get a bit more consistent. I really don't get as much tig steel practice as I'd like.


We cut out some chain plates and bent up some handles for these.



Here they are in use. I had to order the chains I want to use with these. They will be welded to one side and attached with the chain plate to the other.

Nice welds! Clean work too. That's the way it's supposed to look.

Looks really good - I've never seen them before.

What I generally see is people using a couple logs or 4x4's to prop beds.

I like this solution much better

Nice job, I'm also use to seeing 4 x 4" or 6" x 6"...

I really want a plasma table

I have been using the 6x6 method backed up by the support rod. I don't like it as I don't feel it's as safe as it could be. We had to replace the scissor hoist on this truck so we knew we wouldn't be able to use the prop rod as a backup. Also we're having to rig in a whole new scissor hoist so the 6x6 would be in the way. It's also been brought to my attention that what we've been doing is an OSHA violation. There's been several people locally that have been killed working on dump beds.

I love having a plasma table. It's not great for everything. Small detailed parts don't do so well with plasma as laser or water jet would. For general fabrication work it's great to have around. I've gotten pretty fast with programming it. I rarely cut anything by hand unless it's mounted on something that won't go on the table or the skeleton left over from cutting out parts.