It’s been a while now since I purchased my welder and metal fab setup, so I felt like it was time for a quick update.

For anyone that didn’t read my intro to metal fab, one of the items I had acquired early on was a horizontal bandsaw from Harbor Freight. It had great review and was recommended by a few respectable people online, which is how I ended up deciding on it. I can now report back after about 9 months of use that it did not really serve me well. Besides being bulky to store in my limited workspace, I could never get it to cut very well. It would often run into the problem of sort of shearing the bottom of the cut so it wasn’t clean all the way through, it would take too long to cut through even thin metal, and it would sometimes walk the blade crooked so the cut wasn’t straight. This was despite adding weight to the saw, buying a nice bosch blade, and using cutting oil.

So, what did I replace it with I hear you asking feverishly!?

I went all-out and started into the Milwaukee tools ecosystem!

Specifically I sold my horizontal bandsaw and replaced it with the Milwaukee M18 compact bandsaw.

The cutting area is not nearly as big as the Harbor Freight horizontal bandsaw, but it also stores in my toolbox :) In addition, it cuts WAY better. I was expecting it to cut better than the Harbor Freight saw but it still surprised me with just how smooth the cuts were. Even though it is battery powered, I have yet to discharge more than a quarter of the 5ah battery for a day of work (mind you I’m merely a hobbyist).

Besides the saw change, the rest of the tools from my original post hold true, with some additions!

Recently I worked on building out a square tube frame to mount my car’s radiator to. During this project I realized I needed the ability to more easily measure and find angles. To solve this, I started with just a speed square. While that did 80% of the job, I found it still somewhat cumbersome to use in certain situations. So I ended up also getting an angle finder from Home Depot.

With these tools it was a lot easier to find the angles necessary for the bottom pieces of the mount as seen here.

The last big addition was something that I actually already owned, but wanted to mention for anyone getting into metal fab fresh. That piece is a step drill bit! This plus an impact drill makes drilling larger holes in metal a breeze compared to a traditional drill bit. I used mine to cut both the holes for the bottom of the radiator mount and also to cut the holes in the frame for the mounting screws.

Overall the setup is working well for my required work on the car. I am continually running into scenarios where I could really use both an aluminum spool gun and a gas setup for my welder, so that may be the next update post! My welding is still very amateur, but is good enough for the work I’m doing.

I’m excited to keep working on my car and to continue learning. Being able to fabricate my own pieces, even at the rookie level I do, is a huge advantage and opens up a lot of options for my car modifications.

Now I just need to learn how to paint :)