When doing quotes for jobs, a lot of time I have to go at it blind because it's something we've never done before. All "they" care about is getting a number for the cost of work. I come up with a ridiculous amount and throw it at them to see what sticks. We win some, we lose some and that's ok because we have enough to keep us busy. When we win something that we've never done before, we have to come up with a way to pull it off very quickly as we usually only have about 2-3 weeks to deliver from the time the PO is issued. That's when the redneck ingenuity comes into play and we baffle the engineers with how we pull it off.
Currently we got a head's up to a job that is coming in. It has 2 very important parts that I'm not sure how we will manage to make. That's where Hardline comes into play. I thought I'd ask people that are smarter than me how they may go about doing something that I have no idea how to tackle. If you don't want to answer for fear of me getting rich from your idea, fine. If you do want to chime in, fine. If you want to do the job, I'll farm it out to you if you provide a cost that is within reason. If no one answers, I'll let you get back to talking about Josh's sister.
We have done 2 jobs similar to this in the past, but using thinner walled pipe.
On to the question.....
We have 2 sticks that are 21' in length of 3.5" OD x 0.600" wall pipe. These need to be split lengthwise, leaving 2 halves of the pipe that are equal size. How would you go about this? Keep in mind these weigh about 400 lbs each.
As I mentioned, we have split 0.154" and 0.276" wall tube in the past. Once we even split it into thirds, which is not easy. Never have we had to split anything this thick. We used angle iron and a plasma cutter on the smaller stuff and had to bounce around a lot to prevent warping. With this being almost 5/8" thick, I see a lot of heat in it by doing it the way we've done in the past. We thought about trying to run it through a vertical bandsaw but staying centered and straight over 21' length just doesn't sound doable.
Open to suggestions......
Currently we got a head's up to a job that is coming in. It has 2 very important parts that I'm not sure how we will manage to make. That's where Hardline comes into play. I thought I'd ask people that are smarter than me how they may go about doing something that I have no idea how to tackle. If you don't want to answer for fear of me getting rich from your idea, fine. If you do want to chime in, fine. If you want to do the job, I'll farm it out to you if you provide a cost that is within reason. If no one answers, I'll let you get back to talking about Josh's sister.
We have done 2 jobs similar to this in the past, but using thinner walled pipe.On to the question.....
We have 2 sticks that are 21' in length of 3.5" OD x 0.600" wall pipe. These need to be split lengthwise, leaving 2 halves of the pipe that are equal size. How would you go about this? Keep in mind these weigh about 400 lbs each.
As I mentioned, we have split 0.154" and 0.276" wall tube in the past. Once we even split it into thirds, which is not easy. Never have we had to split anything this thick. We used angle iron and a plasma cutter on the smaller stuff and had to bounce around a lot to prevent warping. With this being almost 5/8" thick, I see a lot of heat in it by doing it the way we've done in the past. We thought about trying to run it through a vertical bandsaw but staying centered and straight over 21' length just doesn't sound doable.
Open to suggestions......
