Every now and then you are going to have to notch a piece of tubing or pipe on one of your projects. You can do it with a hand held grinder and a lot of trial and error. You can buy one of the purpose built tubing notchers, but if you are only going to occasionaly use it, it may be cost prohibitive. Or you can do it with a chop saw. A chop saw you ask? Yes, I am going to show you how to notch tubing with a chop saw. You can also do it with a hack saw and a file if you are really bucks down.
The first step is to set your chop saw to 45 degrees, and make a cut about 1/3 of the way from the edge, then rotate your tubing 180 degrees and make an identical cut. What you will have when you are done is two miter cuts that will almost fit the piece of tubing you are going to weld to:
You now have to do a little work with a hand held grinder and round off the edges. You might have to do a little work with a file to fine tune the fit:
You now have a nice notched piece of tubing:
The fit is actually very nice, and I TIG weld notched joints like the one in the photos all the time:
Doing a joint at more than 90 degrees is the same, except that the second miter cut will go more towards the center of the tube as it sits in the chop saw, and it will make a larger cut:
Here is the finished 45 degree notch, and you can see the fit is very nice:
...and here is the finished TIG welded joint, I do these notches on everything from hobby stocks to 8 second drag race cars, and I can do them faster than using a tubing notcher, even though I have two of them:
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: F15Falcon on 12/20/04 3:22am ]</font>
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: F15Falcon on 3/2/05 8:27am ]</font>
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