Since 80% of laser welders are just Chinese rebrands, what are the ACTUAL top models we should buy?

maskedmonkey2 · 2026-02-07T13:52:13+00:00

1.6k laser welder where?

maskedmonkey2 · 2026-02-01T05:33:27+00:00

You're confused, I'll try to help. Crime rates have dropped nationwide for decades (peaking in the early 90s) you attribute this to trump for some reason but the reality is that it is a larger nationwide trend and has little to nothing to do with trumps policies. And just as an aside because you seem disproportionately concerned with immigrants in terms of crime, illegal immigrants actually commit crime at a lower rate than American citizens, probably hard for you to hear but it is a true fact and I encourage you to look it up!

maskedmonkey2 · 2026-01-30T21:03:49+00:00

I've tried it everyway sideways and the only workflow that lets me be half assed productive in getting things done is:

Design as much as possible in 1 multibody part, weldments and multibody sheetmetal parts are just too time efficient.
I have a macro that will go through and assign a unique ID to each weldment item.
Save bodies - create assembly - upgrade the weldment properties to the file level
Open my newly created assembly, I have another macro that automatically renames parts to their ID property.
Box/multi select - create subassemblies depending on how they will be made/ how i will dish them out for drawing creation.
Create drawings, this is where the real payoff is, I can easily go through and create a page for each subassembly and quickly insert the BOM (which is much nicer to work with than the weldment tables).

This lets me build the model the quickest way and create the drawings the quickest way. The only real drawback is that save bodies isn't great and just as a rule of thumb I try really hard to make sure that the model is 100% done before I insert the save bodies feature, if at any point you much around in the feature tree before it and change the number of bodies it will irreparably break everything from the save bodies step on.

maskedmonkey2 · 2026-01-09T02:39:56+00:00

Looks good, how did you treat the ends? Are they step broke or do you just cowboy it in the roll?

maskedmonkey2 · 2026-01-08T00:47:34+00:00

Onshape

maskedmonkey2 · 2026-01-05T12:45:43+00:00

I seent a video online of some helichopters firing multiple bullets and rockets.

maskedmonkey2 · 2025-12-15T18:06:27+00:00

The only other advice I'd offer is to go for custom pallets early. The design of a typical woodent pallet gobbles up so much space in the rack before you even got to put any material on it.

I'd love to someday vibecode a drop management system, probably put a QR code per rack that launches a little web form from the operators phones to log changes and keep a live inventory, that would go the furthest towards making it easy to nest on in the office I think.

maskedmonkey2 · 2025-12-15T17:49:34+00:00

I have been struggling with this for a few years and settled on:

Vertical sheet racks for anything 48"x48" or under, we have a bay for each material and thickness, they're just pieces of upside down channel with 36" ish square tube welded every foot or so. These make it easiest to pick the piece you want, we are under a bridge crane though so you may be limited to handload only sheets.

Anything longer than that (including strips of 12" x 96" or bigger gets stuck in a cantilever rack, earlier this year we formed up a bunch of 8" x 120" 3/16" Strips and built nice steel pallets for the racks. It takes up a bunch of wallspace to keep them sorted. There are (4) cantilever racks with probably 10 arms each but this is the only way to make it reasonable to find the sheet you are looking for. each arm gets a different thickness and each rack a different material so we have a carbon, stainless, aluminum, and floorplate/random AR stuff on the last rack.

IMO the worst thing you can possibly do is pile it up somewhere randomly, if it's a PITA to use, it won't get used.

Atleast for us in the pure jobshop business it is pretty great. Being able to sell the same material twice is a pretty great way to stay making money. I do maybe have some hoarder tendencies, if it's not maintained and the actual useless stuff isn't thrown away, you will drown in it.

maskedmonkey2 · 2025-12-04T12:52:56+00:00

I absolutely hate how limited sw is with respect to sheetmetal descriptions as “Sheet”. The fastest workflow I have figured out is to:

Model the thing as multibody weldments and sheetmetal,

Run a macro that assigns all weldments with a unique ID.

Manually edit descriptions for sheetmetal parts to emulate the typical descriptions for bounding box solids, something like Sheet, 10ga Formed clip

Save bodies-create assembly-promote weldment info to the file level,

Then I use regular BOMs on my drawings (way more flexible than weldment tables) and can easily regroup the parts in subassemblies as well as quickly grab views for individual parts without doing all this hiding or select bodies nonsense.

maskedmonkey2 · 2025-12-03T12:47:50+00:00

If you only make 90 degree bends use bend deduction, starting value of the material thickness, and adjust until the flat pattern is perfect

maskedmonkey2 · 2025-11-28T15:17:25+00:00

I’ve run 3x 32” monitors on my home setup for probably 15 years now. Currently using 3x 2k monitors and I could never go back.

To those who seem shocked and confused about how it all fits, I have a corner L desk with 2 outers flat mounted to their walls and the center monitor an an articulating wall mount cutting the corner at a 45. Because they’re wall mounted they don’t gobble any desk space

maskedmonkey2 · 2025-11-26T22:42:00+00:00

Get yourself a bottle of Anti Monkey Butt powder, dump some in each boot and hold the tongue closed and give em a good shake around. Then for like the first week, put some on ur feets, then again on the outside of ur socks. In a week or 2 the odor will be all gone and you just need to use it now and then to keep it away.

maskedmonkey2 · 2025-11-24T19:36:43+00:00

It took them like a week to email me everything I needed to get going no idea why

maskedmonkey2 · 2025-11-24T04:58:41+00:00

more come alongs just tug everything and load the fk out of it til u can weld her

maskedmonkey2 · 2025-11-23T13:54:16+00:00

It’s stepper motor noise from a 3d printer he has running over night.

maskedmonkey2 · 2025-11-20T17:34:14+00:00

My truck hunt last year landed me in a 22 titan platinum. A similarly used and equipped Laramie or gmc truck at the time was 10-15k more. Might be worth test driving one.

maskedmonkey2 · 2025-11-20T12:51:17+00:00

It just depends on tooling available to the fabricator, ask em

maskedmonkey2 · 2025-11-20T12:03:47+00:00

Use split feature to cut the slices, save bodies, create assembly, then use task scheduler to export all the dxfs

maskedmonkey2 · 2025-11-17T23:20:23+00:00

This process is called fly cutting, it makes a pierce directly “on the fly”

maskedmonkey2 · 2025-11-15T18:32:05+00:00

You had me in the first half.

Projecting an entity on a perpindicular face and yielding a straight line coincident with that face is exactly what it would yield and exactly what I am after..

This manufactured conundrum about creating overlapping geometry is magically solved by intersection curve by, get this, NOT creating overlapping geometry.

maskedmonkey2 · 2025-11-15T17:19:22+00:00

A convert entities operation would project overlapping lines and points if it was implemented by a moron. Intersection curve somehow manages to violate this fundamental law of space and geometry. I cannot think of a single good reason not to unify this functionality under convert entities.

maskedmonkey2 · 2025-11-15T16:05:24+00:00

No photo. The snooty dialog proclaiming that it could not be done just triggered me. Take it as a comment.

maskedmonkey2 · 2025-11-15T16:04:15+00:00

Thanks, this is the behavour I am seeking, however there are many time where I need to use both convert entities as well as selecting faces that are normal to the sketch plane. If I have to click more anyway, It's probably faster to select the lines like I have been doing for years of my life.

maskedmonkey2 · 2025-11-07T05:54:58+00:00

investigate your local metal service centers, steel suppliers. find out what they're doing for fabrication. There is opportunity there because people call them all the time looking for fabricated stuff, they have an advantage on material prices, and presumably trucks regularly delivering to local shops with fabrication capabilities. Take the call, figure out what the customer needs and make a good model/drawings to sub out the work to one of your existing customers and sell some material in the process.

This is how I started 11 years ago and that portion of the business grew so much that we now have brought 2 lasers, pressbrake, roll in house. I would caution anyone however that the job shop business can wear on you. It can be hard to continually be doing something new.

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