Garage fabrication notes
Forty-two revisions
and counting.
One two-car garage, a TIG welder, and an unreasonable amount of titanium. This is where I write up what worked, what caught fire, and what I’d do differently.
Build log
Rev 42: gold-anodizing a titanium shell
Type III anodizing on Ti-6Al-4V doesn't behave like aluminum. After six test coupons I finally landed a warm gold at 28 volts. The crimson panels are a separate masking pass.
Balancing a 12-blade ducted fan at 30k RPM
A 0.2 gram imbalance turned the whole bench into a paint shaker. Here's the cheap phone-accelerometer method I used to chase it down.
Why I switched from MIG to TIG for thin-wall tube
Burn-through on 0.035 in. wall was costing me a frame a week. TIG is slower, but the back-purge setup paid for itself in a month.
A PWM driver for the chest-plate LED ring
Sixty-four LEDs, one microcontroller, and a lot of learning about current limiting. The ring now breathes instead of flickering.
The fume extractor I should have bought sooner
If you weld indoors, buy the extractor before the welder. Mine sits on a rolling cart and follows me around the garage.