Awesome cart. Much like yourself growth in my garage must be vertical. I have been drawing plans for my 252 and 211 to sit on a vertical rack. Love your ideas and design. Certainly will be stealing you power junction box set-up. 1 power cord makes way more sense. I also noticed that you have remote tanks. My thoughts were to go this route as well. Makes the cart a lot easier to move around. That said are you sharing a bottle for any two of your welders? And if so are you splitting at the tank or on the cart? Both of my machines are mig and I'd like to share the Argon with both of them. I'll also have a bottle of helium for the 252 which will also have a 30A spoolgun attached. Last question, I also planned on using 4 swivel casters instead of the big wheels at the back. There has already been a ton of debate on the pros and cons of each system. But again with limited shop space parallel parking the welding cart should be easier with 4 casters. Have you been pleased with this aspect of your cart design? Great work and many thanks in advance for any insight that you're able to share.
-Paul
Sent from my BBF100-2 using Tapatalk
I can’t speak to the debate about big wheels versus little wheels. If you have bottles mounted on the back or you’re moving the cart around a lot, seems like that would make sense. Mine sits next to the bench where I do most of my work. If I was moving it all over the shop this probably wouldn’t be the best design. I lucked into the double wheel casters on eBay. The base of the cart is quarter inch steel, and tapped for fine thread 5/16 bolts to hold the casters on. It looks like it might be top-heavy but it is not, due to the weight at the bottom, double wheel casters, and the casters are offset from the cart.
So I sat back and looked at my current set up, which was a mess, and the two things I needed were horizontal space and cable management. I don’t like the leads and whips hanging out all over the place. And the 220 cords are a PITA, thus the box. Can’t see it in this picture, but there is a space in the bottom of the cart, made with expanded metal, that the 220 cords tuck up into before they are plugged in.
There is an air outlet on the wall, behind where the cart sits, so there will be a whip from it to the plasma.
The four cable hangers sit up inside the cart. Small flexible whips can wrap around vertically. Bigger, less flexible whips like my Aluma pro light can wrap around all four. So there are some options there.
The bottles are mounted to the wall. They are two argon and one CO2. A gas mixer sits on top to run pulse welding on the 255. I went with a second argon tank on the TIG. It would have been more economical to run a splitter off one argon tank, and I thought about doing that, but wanted to cut down on runs to the LWS.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
