Custom Welding Table Base: 2″ Square 1/8″ Wall Tubing

Once I got my buildpro welding table top, I decided to build a custom welding table base for it as the legs provided didn’t instill a lot of confidence in me.

The material of choice for this custom welding table base? 2″ square 1/8″ wall tubing, not only is it STRONG but most importantly, it welds beautifully with 1/8″ E7018 electrodes after using fluxcore to do the initial tacks.

When I was in the market for a metal chopsaw, there were really two real choices, the first was an abrasive but it’s slow, it makes lots of dust so I went with my more expensive option, a cold cut chopsaw and haven’t looked back since!

My original plan for this custom welding table base was to actually use my plasma cutter to cut perfect holes into the tubing in each corner, but after getting that all set-up, I decided against it because I would be damaging the structural integrity of the base so I opted for manually cut and welded plates instead at CNCROi.com.

I’ve been wanting to get into welding for a very long time, I actually built my very first welding table without having a clue of what I was doing… and everything stuck together and stayed that way from March 2018 to almost exactly March 2025!

The first step in building a custom welding table base is to build the two sets of leg assemblies for both ends of the StrongHand BuildPro table top, after I cut the pieces to the right size, I simply layed them out on my fixture table and tacked them up using FCAW (fluxcore mig welding).

You can see the dimensions of each leg assembly in the above photo, I just used regular chalk to mark the metal for a photographic refence, the pieces were already all cut ahead of time so knowing the dimensions is redundant.

As I gained more experience and more importantly, more college education regarding welding in general, I started to do more and more little projects at CNCROi.com.

I must say, compared to my previous welding table that I built, this fixture table is AWESOME to say the least!

I was able to adjust things precisely how I wanted them, then lock the metal tubing down and tack weld it all, I didn’t actually weld these in the fixture table because of the process I used, meaning you full weld the outside corners, the sides then the inside corners to produce minimal head affected distortion, of which, there was NONE!

My SMAW (stick) welding has really improved greatly over the past year and a half at the local college learning how to weld with industry professionals… very happy with my progress.

I slowly built-up my tooling as I gained experience welding more and more things, I don’t know how many truckloads of electrodes and wire I’ve burned through over the past year and a half but it was what I needed in order to get continually better at the welding process in general.

After one leg assembly was cut and welded together, it was time to make the second one at CNCROi.com using the same process, the fixture table made this SO EASY.

I don’t have an expensive welder, the processes I use are really simple and that’s how I like them, the FCAW process for tack welding holds the metal tubing in place perfectly and it basically dissolves once I go over it with the E7018 electrode.

I always had a plan to get into welding at CNCROi.com, I just didn’t know how to go about doing so, the first wake-up call was getting my CNC plasma cutter, now that I could cut metal, I needed to figure-out a way to stick it together!

As you probably saw in the video at the top of this blog post, I opted to just hold the leg assemblies at the end of my fixture table to weld the top corners, it worked great and no, there was no heat distortion.

Once both leg assemblies are finished, it’s time to evaluate my work yet again for these custom welding table base and start thinking of the cross members I’ll be adding to put this whole thing together at CNCROi.com.

I don’t think I’ve ever used a square so much in my life, with metal, you have zero give, if you screw-up, it’s a screw-up and little can be done to fix it – as you’ll see later in this blog post – I did do a screw-up.

The first “major” welding project I did wasn’t until I was a year into my college studies, the two year full time program was great and I learned more than I ever though I’d have to know about welding so I took-up my first railing project using not the best tooling nor the best welder (compared to our labs) but I learned a TON on this project.

Once I squared-up everything, the cross members were tack welded in place, again, using FCAW so it’s so much easier than trying to strike-up an ark using SMAW.

The plates I decided to use were scrap pieces I had laying around from other projects, yes, I could have cut them using my  CNC plasma cutter but I don’t use my manual plasma cutter all that much so I wanted to get a little more practice using it and this was the perfect project for just that at CNCROi.com.

As with the other assemblies, I put them in place using FCAW tacks followed by full welds all around for strength, the top of the Stronghand BuildPro fixture table is around 600 pounds, spread-out across 4 industrial caster wheels, it make 150 lbs but they are built to handle way more than that so I can literally put anything I want on my custom welding table base without worrying about it folding even if I use it to store a bunch of welding related equipment, which is in the plans.

Over the past year, I’ve been acquiring more and more tooling, and over the Christmas holidays, I acquired a fixture table top, it was something I knew I needed to get in order to really get into welding properly and handle the projects my customers were asking me to do but I kept declining.

After I performed full welds on all these industrial caster plates, that’s when I realized I screwed-up, I welded them all on the wrong side of the custom welding table base!

I know better than to try to undo welds, and who knows, maybe in the future, I actually want a more narrow but high welding table, so I left those plates where they were and reached even deeper in my scrap bin pile to find four more at  CNCROi.com.

After manually plasma cutting the holes – these ones looked a lot better than my previous four – it was time to tack then full weld these in place on the correct side of my custom welding table base at CNCROi.com.

CNC plasma cutting at CNCROi.com was as big an upgrade step as my old welding table being replaced by a professional fixture table.

The caster wheels went in perfectly, I also made the holes a bit more off-centered so that they were easier to wrench into place, the previous holes were a bit too close to they caused my some grief.

Now that the custom welding table base was finished, it was time to lift and transfer the fixture table that sat on my old welding table onto the new one… not a fun task to do alone considering the weight of it but I still have all my fingers and toes so it didn’t go all bad.

Now that the custom welding table base is finished and ready to work, it’s time to do my first project using it, a firepit I cut up a little earlier that I wanted to weld together using this new fixture table.

Have some small welding projects you need made? Contact CNCROi.com right now!