Taylor Levinson

A Fine Boi

2020-06-29T23:44:00.001-08:00

The Best Welding Hood, Plus: what to buy on a budget

2017-11-18T18:52:00.001-09:00

Welding headgear has been improving at an impressive clip.

The ideal autodarkening welding helmet would possess the following properties, in order of priority:

externally actuated grind mode

low shade in passive state
lightweight, ergonomic
automatically adjusted welding shade
large viewing area

A grind mode that lets in enough light and is easy to actuate makes the biggest actual real-world difference when you are using a hood. Not only does it make life much easier/faster, but it is an important safety consideration.

Painters spend more time prepping than painting; so it is with welders and grinding. A hood needs a grind mode because grinding sparks are sufficient to trigger the helmet into darkening. If a welder has to reach up inside her mask to activate the grind mode, they're not going to do it. It just doesn't work. Try it. That's how 90% of autodark welding hoods with a grind mode currently work.

$300 of unusable grind mode

What the welder will instead do is remove the welding hood when they need to grind something. And maybe or maybe not put on some other eye protection. Ever had a cutoff wheel fly apart in your face?

Being able to use your welding hood for grinding eye protection is simply the best solution.

Optrel has the closest to ideal hood currently, with their "liteflip Autopilot." It incorporates a flip-up lens with the only auto-adjusting shade currently on the market, aside from ArcOne.

The second most innovative hood is the Optrel Vegaview because of its low 2.5 passive shade and external grind button. I also like the way that Miller and 3M have increased peripheral vision on the Miller T94 and Speedglas version, respectively. Eastwood is now selling a hood that does a lot of these things at a slightly lower pricepoint and quality level, here.

Manufacturers are finally catching on to the importance of the external grind button. Look at ESAB and 3M's latest hoods.

What should I buy on a budget?

The widely cloned Chinese hoods like this one are good solid hoods to be sure. It has a pretty standard passive shade of 4, which is still useable. My main beef with these is the lack of an external grind button. Instead it has a non-intuitive dial, which makes it difficult to consistently set it back to your welding shade.

Another good option is an old-school passive helmet with an Arcone autodark filter.

What about your lungs?

You don't think MIGing some galvanized widget together is more important than your lungs and body, do you? I've done it too, but let's move forward.

Here are 2 simple ways to have respiratory protection without using a PAPR. And by the way, a basic p100 filter is usually all that's necessary for welding hazards.

1) Buy the North full face welding respirator (mine was $100 on ebay) and use the abovementioned ArcOne lens.

2) Wear a normal AP Respirator under your hood. It's not that bad.

I tried this "backpack" adapter that north offers, but I couldn't recommend it. The 90° elbow was actually thicker than the pancake cartridges.

Other Considerations

All battery-powered things without replaceable batteries are disposable
4 sensors is better than 2

Text People From Your Email with an Applescript

2017-06-26T14:51:00.000-08:00

I have often wanted to send someone a text from my email.

Especially when traveling outside of my cell carrier's area.

This is easy to do, but you have to know the recipient's carrier. No more.

My phone took a dump the other day, so I went ahead and made this little script.

Just put in the phone number and paste the output into the email "To" field.

I haven't tested this with every provider or anything, but it should work for the majority of people in the U.S. (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint)

input: phone number to text

output: just paste that in the email

You can download the applescript here

How I Made a Sandblasting Hood

2017-04-15T17:36:00.000-08:00

Overview

To media blast safely, you need the following:

1) eye protection

2) sand in nooks and crannies you didn't know you had protection

3) respiratory dust protection

When sandblasting smaller parts inside an enclosure, the enclosure provides 1, 2, and most of 3.

When sandblasting bigger parts, you are right there in the enclosure with all of the sand. So, how to get the necessary protection?

1) eye protection: goggles or face shield

2) sand in nooks and crannies you didn't know you had protection: some kind of fabric covering

3) respiratory dust protection: necessary, even if you use "silica free" blast media. any p100 filter (pink respirator cartridge) will do the trick.

These 3 protections are usually provided by a sandblasting hood. However, all of them that you can buy are either very expensive or unsafe.

(If you're interested, this is because commercial blasters use a supplied air hood (expensive) and all of the cheap sandblasting hoods for sale do not include or are incompatible with respirators (they fog up))

This post is about my approach to achieving all 3 economically. In fact I didn't have to buy anything for this because all of the components are useful for other tasks.

Things I Used

flip up face shield (preferably one with a frame like this)
old sheet
elastic
adhesive backed velcro
respirator with p100 filter
plastic hose

Making it

When I made my hood, I started with a flip up face shield. I then created a perimeter "gasket" around it with adhesive backed velcro. My velcro faced outward on top and inward on the bottom. Cutting notches in the velcro helped it curve a little on the top. On the bottom the curves were too tight so I used little pieces to form the curve.

I chose velcro because I still wanted to be able to use the face shield without the hood.

I didn't take any pictures of the next steps, oops:

The next step was to attach the corresponding velcro to the velcro on the flip up face shield.

Then I pinned that velcro to my fabric. This was the trickiest part - getting the fabric to fit the 3d shape. When I was happy with it, I made sharpie "alignment marks" for future attachment.

I don't think it matters too much what type of fabric you use. I used lightweight cotton from an old sheet.

After I was happy with how the fabric was pinned to the velcro, I carefully ripped the velcro off from the face shield, leaving it pinned to the fabric. I then sewed the velcro in place.

After it was sewed I cut out the face shield circle inside of the velcro.

Then I basically had a hole in the middle of a sheet. To make that fit a person, I reattached it to the face shield and draped it over an unsuspecting bystander:

and proceeded to pin it in place. Then I sewed those pinned areas.

When I was happy enough with that, I cut the bottom of it to length and sewed on some elastic.

The last step was to sew on some underarm loops. Mine are simple pieces of elastic through an adjustable buckle.

When I tried it while wearing a respirator, I got fog on the inside of the face shield.

My solution was to attach a hose to the exhaust hole of the respirator so that exhaled moisture would go outside the hood.

Recommendations

If you want to make one like I made with a face shield, I would recommend getting a face shield with a frame like this one. Unfortunately I did not do this, so my velcro is attached to a consumable piece. So when my plastic lens is scratched up I will be up the creek...

If you want an extended respirator exhaust, it is best to get a respirator with a bit of plastic there to glue to. The North brand respirators work well for this because they have a clip on plastic piece to glue to. The respirator works fine without the plastic piece there.

Other ways to do a similar thing worth considering:

use goggles instead of a face shield and sidestep the fog issue entirely
use a full face respirator (they deal with the fog issue internally) and sew a hood around that

The Cheapest Place in the World to Learn Scuba

2016-02-16T08:43:00.001-09:00

Max and Lily were the first travelers we met that were more price-conscious than us. So when they said they were going scuba diving in Honduras, I listened closely.

Turns out Utila is probably the cheapest place in the world to get your PADI Open Water cert, the driver's license of the scuba diving world. It will still blow our daily budget, true, but, hey...breathing underwater!

After 2 days of travel, a night in "the most dangerous city," and a boat ride, we are on Utila!

We spent our first day comparison shopping, which felt like a poor man's version of timeshare touring. Lara and I had fun discussing which of the various dive shops' persuasive techniques were most effective on us. We also got our most valuable tips from an unbiased 3rd party on the island, which were:

Talk to the instructor him/herself
Look at the equipment
Look at the boat

After the tiniest morsel of haggling, we settled into our room for the first of 6 included nights at Alton's Dive Center.

And I thought I wasn't going to school this semester. Class starts tomorrow!

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Observing tie-up methods before the ride to Utila

The dock at Alton's