Day 2: Boom Testing

George, who is my supervisor by the way, and I finally finished assembling the boom manipulator. He blew out the welding torch yesterday (see above) so we had to wait till today get replace it. When we were welding, the clamp to hold the torch in place wasn't fastened tight enough so it fell onto the plate and got melted . Basically what we did today was finish up the assembling process and tested some welds. We welded two flat steel plates onto the I-beams to make a box column. In the picture above you can see a general idea of how an I-beam looks like before its welded and after welding it looks like the box shaped beam next to it, except the box beam in the picture is missing the plate in the middle (I couldn't take pictures of what we did so I found pictures online that most resembled the work we did today). It was quite interesting watching the welding process, it takes about 33 Volts to melt the metal wires needed for the welds. The temperature needed to melt the metal wires is about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, with the AC/DC currents running it takes no more than two seconds for the machine to reach this temperature so its a pretty interesting phenomenon. At one point it was so hot that it melted through the top plate of the I-beam because we were moving too fast with the machine; sparks were flying and I thought George got hit, it was quite intense!