There are so many issues with this video.
When using power tools, safety should be your number one concern.
- Never use an angle grinder without the blade guard installed. Is it inconvenient at times? Sure. But you know what else is inconvenient? Trying not to bleed to death or being blinded over what should have been a quick and easy job.
- Always wear the proper personal protective equipment (PPE). That includes a heavy long sleeve shirt, gloves, safety classes, a dust mask, and a hard hat (especially when cutting poles or other materials that are vertical and have a risk of falling).
Make sure the glasses are not heavily tinted, else you’d be unidentifiable so your friends wouldn’t hit you up on a conversation when they happen to walk past you.
And not to be forgotten, hearing protection.
Good call. My low grade tinitus should have reminded me of this one.
What?
I offer (sometimes only mentally) a hearty Fuck You to anyone making that joke when they find out I have hearing loss.
<h1>Hearing protection!</h1>
Earring production? What?
The hard hat especially. A professor at my college died from shrapnel to the brain, and they had taken every precaution but that.
Was it shrapnel from above?
Nope, just an unlucky trajectory
Definitely, if cutting down aluminum posts in public, the most inconspicuous thing is doing it im the daytime, wearing a hard hat, tinted saftey glasses, a high vis vest, saftey gloves etc.
Have your spotter dressed in the same attire but with a clipboard.
As someone who has worked as a professional construction clipboard holder. You can literally do whatever you want as long as you have a clipboard and a hard hat.
Don’t forget the hi-vis
If you’re dressing up to take it down, you’re better off with wrenches to take it down properly. Everyone going to know what you’re doing cutting it in half. Make sure to wear electrical insulated gloves(also good for hiding finger prints), cap off the live wires with wire nuts and leave a traffic cone.
Taking it down properly makes it easier* for them to put it back up though
Unbolting a broken post before putting a new one up is marginal effort. People should be using a variety of methods depending on the circumstances and to keep the authorities guessing.
Also, a portable band saw would cut through like butter compared to an angle grinder plus it’s orders of magnitude quieter. I can get through 4", 3/16 drop posts in like 20 seconds with a band saw and it’s much safer
welp, that’s a thing i haven’t seen before
I’m guessing they mean a model like this one.
https://www.burnstools.com/xbp04z-18v-lxt-bl-compact-bandsaw-bare
Also, keep the shoe of the reciprocating saw firmly against the workpiece to start, and throughout the cut.
I will never understand why people take the guards off their grinders. When those discs go pop they’re gonna fuck you up.
And do you really wanna get fucked up in service of fucking over a
Flock camerarandom aluminium tube on a job site?Because it’s hard or impossible to fit the grinders in some spaces like inside corners because the guards hit structure. I keep my guards on but it’s a pain in the ass to have to keep swiveling the guard to get into some spots, if it will fit at all. Either way, wearing a full face shield ppe is the minimum when using one of these. Guard or not they do a lot of damage when they let go.
I can’t tell what exactly he used in the circular saw, but if it’s a saw meant for cutting wood, you can only get away with cutting aluminum, not steel or anything else harder than aluminum. That’s fine in this use case though. If you do have a wood cutting saw, you’ll either want a blade for aluminum or a high tooth wood blade.
If they start using steel for their posts, you’ll want to upgrade to a saw and saw blade meant for steel. They make carbide blades for hard metals.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/home/tools/g19731042/cordless-metal-cutting-saws/
“Unlike France, we’re got going to give up our liberties for safety.”
I hope he’s being ironic with that one. The French are the first willing to burn things to the ground if the government starts encroaching on their rights.
Next up: steel blades are classified as weapons of mass destruction and owning them privately a federal offense.
Yes. Erode what’s left of their working class support base.
I fucking love Lemmy.
Also, if pure speed is your game and noise is not a problem, a gas powered cut off saw will eat a pole like this like butter. But they spray sparks everywhere and make a TON of noise. Battery powered circular saws are the clear winner
Your link to the saws is a bit outdated, here is a great deal on a modern cordless metal cutting circular saws that is made for this stuff:
And if you want to be a big shot:
These units are more powerful, faster, and designed for cutting a variety of metals you may encounter on the streets. They also collect chips so the risk of them getting in your clothes as evidence against you is reduced.
I just don’t want to come across as shilling any one brand and just posted one of the first overviews I found. I bought my metal cutting saws years ago for fab work, so I’m otherwise, speaking from experience.
If the sawzall is vibrating your hands, you aren’t using it right. The workpiece should be tight against the shoe, not floating in the middle of the blade. Push the tool hard against the workpiece, and slowly lever the blade through the cut.
If you’re using it right, it will take less than 30 seconds. Longer than the circular saw, but much easier to handle. It only requires one cut instead of two.
Circular saw will not work on steel pipes; reciprocating saw will, with either a demolition blade or a metal cutting blade.
100% The sawzall would be the right tool for that job. He wasn’t letting the blade do the work.
Bugged the shit out of me too.
Yeah I thought he had gummed up a fine tooth metal blade the way it was cutting, but that was a carbide thick metal blade. Still had melted aluminum on it, but plenty of cutting left in it.
Dunno if he was intentionally doing it wrong but the shoe definitely needs to be kept up against the material of at all possible. (You know, unless you’re demoing out a residential door frame or something that needs a little room to breath)
There is a reason to take these working piece off the shoe and it is to have the blade last longer by using other spots on the blade. It also help reduce heat which extends the life of the blade as well.
Good tools have extendable shoes, rather than fixed. When you wear out the bottom of a blade, you can extend the shoe past the worn out part of the blade and keep cutting.
When you aren’t working against the shoe, you have to take care to ensure the blade is actually reciprocating through the workpiece. When the blade binds in the work, the tool reciprocates rather than the blade, and the blade isn’t cutting the piece.
Yes yes, all true. Dude was not cutting that aluminum pipe efficiently tho.
It’s amazing how much of tool use is intuitive. I don’t really put into words a lot of what I do because it’s just, you know, the right way to do it
I had to cut some steel poles off a trampoline frame.
Mind you, i’m not very strong but I was able to use a hacksaw I bought for like $20. It had grips on both sides.
I cut off all the poles in about 20 min. Just gotta keep it level. Makes very little noise.
I wore grip gloves to make it easier.
I highly recommend hacksaws with grips on both ends as this really helped. I bet someone stronger than me could cut through a pipe in about a min or 2 with one of them.
Barely making any noise.
You would probably also want to wear a mask to keep from breathing metal powder. Eye protection as well!
Something something magnetic so don’t carry a phone.
You could also use a sawzall, but imo the best of both is the portaband.
Good knowledge for everyone to know. For no reason other than to share knowledge. Yes.
You know, Gallium is pretty neat, does all sorts of fun stuff with Aluminum.
does it work through the paint?
No, need a good scratch to get it going.
You guys are silly.
Great for clean copper cuts but not super fast and won’t work if it’s not perfectly round.
They make bigger ones designed for harder metals, and they have the advantage of being much quieter than a circular saw or an angle grinder
These will go through aluminum like butter and you probably won’t find a pole that isn’t round enough to cut.
FYI, if you’re a Flock employee: You’ll need a bigger one for the 2⅞" poles on your job
Just hold their beer. Almost there!
This would be a good time waster, but that depends on how they “repair” them. Do they diagnose the issues, or do they just install a new one and toss the old one?
Its probably a 150 to 300/dollar loss I’m guessing.
That sounds more reasonable.
Drill a hole and spray a solvent into it to dissolve the plastic insulation.
It probably wouldn’t take long to figure out that it isn’t getting power through the solar panels. I’d guess testing the voltage on those connectors would be one of the earlier checks they do (there’s probably even an led on that circuit so they can see without even needing the voltmeter).
Someone might get hurt when a strong gust of wind finishes that cut, too.
Sending someone out to test it is what costs the money. There aren’t “Flock Techs” that get a salary to fix these things, they just hire contractors to do installs and move on.
Every minute it’s down is a dollar out of Flock’s pocket because it’s not transmitting anything useful and every contractor hired to diagnose the issue is another dollar out of the pocket of the people that contracted with Flock.
Seems like a reasonably sound strategy outside of the safety concern imo.
Good way to hurt innocent people when that fall in the street or on someone.
What does this accomplish over taking it down? It does a funni? Same risk, but less effective
It’s not legal or encouraging advice, just commentary. It’s the equivalent of a dreded home improvement project where everything goes wrong but you don’t know yet.
Let’s update the toilet! So you go to Lowes (not home deportation depot) and you spent time getting it. Then you find out the valve is stuck so that’s another Lowes trip. Next you get the toilet ready but the flooring is all rotted. So you take another Lowes trip. ETC.
You increase the servicing time per toilet. Like the difference between replacing an engine and having to diagnose a dead engine because your alternator stopped working at the same time that the starter and fuel pump stopped working.
Those who give up Liberty for safety deserve neither.
Write that down.
I like the full quote by Benjamin Franklin,
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
I’ve found when cutting or milling aluminum that the cuts go faster and my blade stays cleaner using a cutting fluid.
My go-to for field work is Anchorlube. Water based, easy cleanup, and it sticks to vertical surfaces pretty well, but will still flow when needed. All of that balling on the blades goes away of you use a little cutting fluid
Definitely need to use something if you’re pushing your feeds and speeds or otherwise generating heat.
Tools coated in (non-aluminum) coatings - Titanium nitride, titanium carbonitride, titanium diboride, etc) work much better than bare steel or carbide tooling. (TiAlN/AlTiN and other aluminum-based coatings are much, much worse…)
☝️ this one metals
A portable band saw with the appropriate blade for either soft metal or hard metals is the only thing I’d use
This will come in very useful for building my roof drain! 👍
You can get a knockoff Makita angle grinder off aliexpress for cheap and it works great if you guys still have access to aliexpress. I have a decent set of chinakita tools in the garage myself, only the garden tools and batteries are legit Makita.
Harbor Freight will sell you cheap cutting tools for this kind of work.
I love the burp towards the end. This just dripped with swagger.
