I’d like to begin offering some powder coat and Dynatorch project classes so members can hands on practice. Where have y’all found the best place is to go buy some simple sheet metal?
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What part of town?
I live in rowlett but can obviously go to places in between home and the space for a reasonable price. I know I can pay full freight at many yards but am trying not to make the class fee astronomical
You can go to Garland steel. It however is not as easy to look at what they have as Metals4u has. You can just walk into their showroom at Metals4U. Garland steel you have to go to their counter to talk to them and then go look. That was the impression I got the last time I went there. There was a hell of a line with no real order to it just to say I want to go look in the yard.
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Sounds good. Do I need to submit a lesson plan to committee or anything? Itll be the first class I’ve done in metal shop and I’m not sure how yall run them
Have at it. Let us know if you need anything from the committee. If you have class material of sheet metal feel free to mark it as so and put it to the side out of the way. Put a date on it as well so we will know when it was placed. If you finish with it or life happens let us know.
This goes for others that want to teach. If you need to store materials for a class for metal shop let myself or Jim @hon1nbo know, preferably both of us in a message.
We want people to teach, whatever we can do to help we will.
There is one thing you will need, and that’s for powder coating.
If you teach people to operate the oven myself, @TBJK, or @Cyberzombie78 will just need to observe one training since it’s a training required device.
It sounds like the dynatorch is more office-hours style and not a full class, so it should all be people who have taken it before. if you want to teach the dynatorch to fulfill training requirements then one of the existing instructors would need to sit in the first time and you would be good after that.
If the powder coating is the same (people who have run the oven before or are using the small oven) then no worries.
I’m not doing any work for the next couple days, but I may pop in here and there and can sign you off on training the powder coating oven if someone doesn’t beat me to it.
Cheers,
-Jim
I’m getting signed off all official like on powder coat tonight. (I’ve done it before just not at the space. I figured I’d make it more a practice class than training by having folks make yard signs/art to start)
If anything I may need a train the trainer for y’alls welding classes if the yard art part proves to be popular. Just let me know if you guys prefer a materials fee format payable to DMS and I’ll submit for reimbursement or just to order supplies.
I had some large sheet aluminum custom cut for my horse trailer at Metal Supermarkets in Plano (2 miles east of Collin Creek Mall north of Plano Parkway). They also have smaller pieces, drops, etc. of steel and aluminum and can also order custom pieces with a couple days’ notice.
There are three locations in the Metroplex:
If you are looking for small pieces, you could also buy a large sheet and cut out custom shapes on the CNC plasma to have something more interesting than rectangles with which to work.
My favorite scrape metal yard is Ace Iron and Steel on Irving Blvd.
Not on your way to/from DMS.
Nice people and excellent prices.
I’m not too big of a fan of Metal Supermarkets. They may have it but you will pay more for it usually.
That’s the end goal. I need to familiarize myself again with inkscape since most members don’t have AI, but then we will do a start to finish file creating and cut then a second class powdercoating them for folks who don’t enjoy that rusty look
FWIW, the plasma s/w supports DXF so AI can be used to generate your files as well.
I’m totally an AI person. I just figure for class purposes I better use inkscape since it doesn’t seem like a huge chunk of membership has it
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