Manufacturing motorcycle mufflers

Fabricator finds improvement with rotary swaging

September 1, 2009

Like all manufacturers, Woodsage Industries is always on the lookout for a better way to manufacture the many components it produces for OEMs. It recently devised a way to make one-piece external muffler shells for motorcycles and all-terrain vehicles.

You don’t have to look far to find a motorcycle these days. Riders purchased 900,000 motorcycles in 2008, nearly triple the number sold in 1995. The best-known motorcycle rally, held annually in Sturgis, S.D., regularly draws more than 400,000 riders. In total, organizers put together nearly 1,000 motorcycle-related events every year. That’s not bad for a mode of transportation that was once the domain of not-quite-law-abiding individuals who formed nonmainstream social clubs (biker gangs).

The allure of motorcycles is centered mainly on three criteria: How does it look, how fast does it go, and how does it sound? All three result from extensive engineering, prototyping, and manufacturing efforts. As in all other areas of manufacturing, the OEMs are always on the lookout for a better method. One motorcycle manufacturer, Victory Motorcycles, a division of Polaris Industries Inc., turned to one of its suppliers, Woodsage™ Industries, for input on its exhaust systems.

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Do you know someone doing something cool with metal? Let us know!

Chris Santistevan and John Hams (left to right)

At Arc-Zone.com we get some interesting customers, and Chris Santistevan is no exception. He not only a trapeze artist he is a welder too!

At night he dazzles visitors at the Las Vegas Ultimate Variety Show (see video below).

By day, however, he can be seen fabricating stainless steel above-ground pools for high rise hotels in the city.

Chris called us up looking for a good tungsten grinding solution– Arc-Zone.com offers the industry’s most comprehensive line up of tungsten sharpeners.

He was concerned that his newer employees were wasting a lot of time dressing tungsten on side grinders, and they were getting inconsistent welds.  We got him hooked up with a Sharpie DX-K pro-kit, and he told us a little bit about his work.

Chris fabricates stainless steel custom pool liners as well as  supply pipes, flanges, and tubes.  I didn’t know this, but evidently it’s a requirement that hotels with pools above the twelfth floor have the pool made entirely from TIG welded stainless steel!

Once completed, the pool is then sprayed with gunite to look like  a traditional pool.   As Chris points out, no one ever actually gets to see his work, but it is critical to the safety of the hotel nonetheless!

And check outhis other metallic creations at his website.  Or, for more information about this innovative artist, you can read this article:

Riverview Artist Welds Castoffs Into Career

By D’ANN LAWRENCE WHITE

RIVERVIEW – There is nothing particularly attractive about artist James Oleson’s medium.

His studio is little more than an open shed surrounded by wood fencing, tucked behind Winthrop Town Centre off Bloomingdale Avenue in Riverview. Piled haphazardly around the shed are worn lawn mower blades, greasy machinery gears, discarded steel doors, beat-up car door panels and other junkyard finds he’s found worth salvaging.

The cast-offs once destined for landfills inspire Oleson’s works of art. From ugliness Oleson creates beauty. From near-worthless bits of debris Oleson creates sculptures that command thousands of dollars and are displayed across the country.

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If you or anyone one you know aspires to be an innovative welder in this, or any other field, please contact us.  We would love to feature you on our blog.

Photo By Matt Trombley

Brown Dog Welding is a one man welding and fabrication shop located just north of Detroit in Mt. Clemens, Michigan. Josh Welton, of Brown Dog Welding, designs inventive home furnishings, sculptures, and accessories –from miniature motorcycles to belt buckles. Josh named his business after his beloved dog, Woodson, and he donates 10 percent of his profits to two organizations, Home Fur-Ever and Lifebuilders. I was excited to get a chance to interview Josh.

1. How long has your company been in business?

Just over 1 year.

2. I see you’re headquartered in the Detroit area. How long have you been there? How has the recent economic crisis affected business at this location? What drew you to the area?

My wife Darla and I have lived in the Detroit suburb of Mount Clemens, Michigan for almost 6 years. Her family has worked in and around the auto industry for decades, so the last few years has been pretty stressful. As a low seniority skilled trade worker in the industry, I saw the writing on the wall and started putting money away and building up my own shop. A lot of my work is kind of in it’s own niche, and since I started from nothing I have been steadily getting busier. I have seen several stores and galleries that had displayed my work fail, but the majority of my business is done either online or locally through word of mouth.

Photo By Matt Trombley

I hired into Chrysler in 2002 as a millwright apprentice. A couple of the journeymen that I trained under were excellent welders, and they were more than willing to share their knowledge and experiences with me. The factory maintenance setting was cool, because we did a wide variety of welding (on top of the other millwright duties). I did a lot of field repairs using stick welding, some in shop fabrication with mig and tig, and also aluminum, stainless, and tool steel repairs with TIG. It was something different every day, and I loved it.

4.What is your educational background as it relates to welding?

My basic skills came from the intro welding classes at Macomb Community College as part of the apprenticeship, and also from the journeymen I worked with as an apprentice. Beyond that, the UAW and Chrysler had a TERRIFIC technical training center that I took full advantage of. With an up-to-date welding shop and certified instructors with 30-50 years of experience in the field, I wouldn’t be where I am right now without that.

Photo By Matt Trombley

For my business model, I’m kind of doing my own thing. I don’t borrow money, I work out of my own shop, and my overhead is low. I know it’s not the sexiest way to do work, but I’m not a huge risk taker. I want Brown Dog Welding to grow naturally. I never want to be in a position where I’m in over my head and can’t keep my clients happy, or where I’ve borrowed money and can’t pay it back.

On the creative side of things, most of my inspiration comes from the scrap metal itself. Different shapes and sizes, or trying to find a way to make an idea work with what I have to work with is where much of the design comes from.

6.How old were you when you first got into welding and what initially
sparked your interest?

I got kind of a late start. Despite my dad’s mechanical abilities, I was never into working in the garage or taking shop class when I was a kid. As a matter of fact, when I first started as a millwright, my grandpa joked: “Don’t you have to have some type of mechanical aptitude to do that?” Ha! So pretty much my first experience with welding was when I was hired in at Chrysler as a 24 year old. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but there was an incredible draw to melting two pieces of metal and making them one. From that first arc sparked with a 6010 rod, I was hooked.

Photo By Matt Trombley

I’ll weld just about anything. My main business is doing the metal art and accessories, but I really enjoy doing fabrication and repair work. I do some mobile work right now, and I’m hoping to increase my mobility soon.

8.What certifications do you hold and how have they benefited you and/or your business?

The certifications I have right now were obtained through Chrysler, so they really don’t have any direct benefit on the outside. The process of certifying itself is what was the most helpful. Going through such stringent tests and seeing the standards you need to hold in order to pass is a great experience. I wasn’t able to test as much as I wanted, but I did hold a couple of 6g TIG certs, from 3/8” diameter 1/16” thick wall and up. I didn’t get the chance to test for 6g stick, but I had made it up to 4g. All tests were in accordance with ASME and AWS standards.

I think that going through some level of certification is a must for welders. I see a lot of guys that lay pretty decent beads and do pretty nice fab work that really don’t understand joint prep and bead profile, for example, and just think that any metal melted together is good enough.

Photo By Matt Trombley

I’ve sold bikes, buckles, and other items from coast to coast in North America. The internet has been as important to my business as any other tool I own. I made a conscious decision when I started that I needed a sharp website and a strong web presence to do what I wanted to do.

10.What kind of music do you listen to while welding?

I really dig classical piano, especially Chopin and Rachmaninov…. the expressions and moods that they pushed out of their instrument is unreal. But on the other end of the spectrum, I’ll be screaming along to Rage Against The Machine or Nirvana, or I’ll calm down and hit up some
Radiohead.

Photo By Matt Trombley

I would love to open up my own gallery, with a welding shop in the back. I think that would be pretty cool.

12.Where do you see the welding industry in the next ten years?

I think you’ll see more automated welding, more laser, friction, and plasma welding, more advances in technology as needs and materials change. Beyond that, big business wants to take the human element out of everything. Instead of investing in labor, they’ll invest in technology …..which is fine until the robots take over (I kid, I kid….I just watched the new Terminator flick). I hope I’m wrong, but I just don’t see an explosion of higher paying welding jobs. The industry doesn’t want to afford it. You’ve already seen it in the shipyards, where they banded together and basically said “we won’t pay more than x amount of dollars for a skilled welder, but we’ll dump hundreds of millions into robots and hire grunt welders.” There should be a place for the human element of reason and skill that pays decent living wages.

Photo By Matt Trombley

Get as wide of a variety of experience as you can. From gas to tig to mig to stick, from pipe welding to sheet metal work, from working in a shop to working in the field. I wish I would have gotten an earlier start on my career, right from high school. Schooling and training do not have to be expensive, take advantage of your high school shop classes and local community colleges. Find people with experience and pick their brains …..a lot of welding is flat out experience.

Just having talent won’t make you a great welder. Just working hard and practicing won’t make you a great welder. Just having experience won’t make you a great welder. But if you can get 2 out of 3 you could be pretty good, and when you put the whole package together, the sky is the limit.

Innovative welder and designer, Joel Hester, transforms battered hoods of old Chevy and Ford trucks onto handsome conference tables and furniture.

Before

After

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and then SHOW ME THE METAL! tell us about YOUR project!

From facilities complete with tubing, piping, valves and more to the equipment needed to transport the finished product you are looking at a big opportunity for the metal fabrication market.

From Today’s LA Times:

As the state moves to reduce the carbon footprint of fuel, an engineer hopes to build a plant in Lancaster that will convert garbage into an alcohol-based mixture.
By Margot Roosevelt. April 22, 2009

Arnold Klann has a green dream.

It began 16 years ago in a sprawling laboratory in Anaheim. This year, he hopes, it will culminate at a Lancaster garbage dump.

There, in the high desert of the Antelope Valley, Klann’s company, BlueFire Ethanol Fuels, plans to build a $100-million plant to convert raw trash into an alcohol-based fuel that will help power the cars and trucks of the future.

It’s just the sort of improbable concoction that California is now demanding. On Thursday, the state is expected to adopt the world’s first regulation to reduce the carbon footprint of fuel. And, just as California created the first market for catalytic converters decades ago, this rule, a likely model for national and even global calculations, could jump-start a huge demand for new technologies.
CONTINUE READING LA TIMES ARTICLE–>

We’re ready… are you?

And now, they still remain connected, although in a different way: they help to keep each other in business.

In dirt-track racing (how Eddie got started in his career), you need something called a “hot shoe”.  No, they’re not hot.  And no, they’re not really shoes.  They are actually the antithesis of their name – they keep your shoes from getting hot.

On a dirt racetrack, as the rider leans the bike into the turns, he has to stick out his left foot to keep balance and direct the bike through the corner.  And, as you can imagine, direct contact with hard-packed dirt going over a hundred miles an hour might hurt your foot just a little bit.

That’s where the hot shoes come in.  Hot shoes are metal casings that are formed around the bottom of your riding boot.  They are perfectly shaped so that they don’t fall off or let dirt in when you use them to turn that corner at speed.

Iron Cobbler Hot Shoes is a company out of Salinas, Ca that custom makes hot shoes for riders in AMA district 36.  They use the best tungsten carbide hardfacing available to make them and let me tell you, this material is not for the faint of heart.  It’s the same stuff used for mining equipment.  If it can dig into rocks, it can certainly protect your feet from a little wear and tear.

So where do Joe Welder and Arc-Zone.com come into this?  Well, in order to create great hot shoes, you need the proper welding equipment by your side.  And what better place to find it at than Arc-Zone.com?  If you’re interested in welding hot shoes, check out our TIG section, especially the Tungsten Grinders…

DPS “innovators” second in car-creation competition Jason Carmel Davis, Press & Guide Newspapers, 11/30/2008

DEARBORN- A group of 10 Dearborn Public School District (DPS) students-seven current and three recent graduates-worked seven days a week for 15 months to create something most teens dream about producing.

The team of students built a car.

The finished product can seat two people. It has a seat from a 2001 Ford Escape and neon green flames that start on the hood and make their way around both sides. The drive system on the car combined an 18:1 limited ship differential and axles from an electric golf cart, with a custom 36V, high-speed golf cart motor. The combination of the two provides excellent torque, traction and limited off-road capability, according to the team’s Web site, ivd.dearbornschools.org. CONTINUE READING ONLINE –>

Manufacturing is a High Note for Aluminum Guitar Maker


Bass electric-guitar player Jim Normandy once shopped around for an archtop guitar–an acoustic guitar with a full body and distinctive arched top.

But the $3,000 price stopped him short. “Manufacturers were making custom guitars from solid billeted aluminum. I was still in graduate school and couldn’t afford such instruments. So I decided to make a competitively priced guitar. Instead of wood or plastic, I opted to use 0.080-in. aircraft-grade aluminum sheet metal because of its quality and durability,” says the then-future CEO of Normandy Guitars, Salem, Oreg. CONTINUE READING ONLINE AT MachineDesign.com–>

Are you or anyone you know currently working on an interesting welding application or project? If so, feel free to let us know and…SHOW ME THE METAL™!

This guy uses any kind of metal he can get his hands on, from the hub of a snowmoblile trailer, to a rusted 55 gallon drum.

Salvaging the scrap heap

By Bea Lewis
CITIZEN.COM, Article Date: Sunday, November 16, 2008

Guy McIntyre of Tilton showcases his welding skills by creating animal sculptures as well as abstract art.

“It takes all my talents as a welder and fabricator to make something like that,” he says as he stands next to a giant blue heron he crafted out of aluminum. The wings are made of diamond plate creating the appearance of feathers.

“I’ve worked on planes, trains, automobiles, ships, bridges and high-story buildings,” he said.
CONTINUE READING ONLINE –>

What are you working on? Show Me The Metal™ !