Sheet metal art

[Dennis Ford]

My first attempt at metal art. It used up a 4 x 8 sheet of 16 ga steel and a bunch of time. About 4 ft tall. Since this picture I have painted the concrete base a dark brown. Comments and critiques welcome.

[Bruce Page]

Nice! You can see a lot of metal art in Santa Fe NM, this would fit right in. Are the seems soldered?

[Dennis Ford]

It is welded (Harbor Freight flux core machine).

[John K Jordan]

It is welded (Harbor Freight flux core machine).

That sure is clean for flux core!

Did you cut the steel with a plasma torch? Ever since I got my plasma torch I've wanted to try something more exciting than my stainless steel burn barrel and llama trailer mods. I have a big piece of stainless sheet that would be fun to cut up.

JKJ

[Dennis Ford]

It took a lot of grinding to clean up the spatter from the flux core welding. I mostly use a stick machine but got the flux core for occasional welding of thin metal. If I start doing much sheet metal, I will get a MIG welder.
Cut with a jigsaw, with the right blade it does a good job.

[Mel Fulks]

The solid copper look is pretty convincing. When it's in an open area where you will pass it and walk around it ,I think you will be encouraged to do more.

[John K Jordan]

It took a lot of grinding to clean up the spatter from the flux core welding. I mostly use a stick machine but got the flux core for occasional welding of thin metal. If I start doing much sheet metal, I will get a MIG welder.

I suspected a bunch of the effort was grinding and sanding. I got a MIG a few years ago and it's a major improvement over the flux-core.

Do you have any photos of the work in progress? It would be nice to see things like how you bent the steel so smoothly and shots of just-welded and after cleanup. I suspect planning the shapes and even the order of construction was challenging - did you make a cardboard mockup first to get templates? I do that when making something with "odd" shapes.

I know people who do sheet metal work on cars with a flux-core welder. I repaired a rusty hole in the door of my old '75 Chevy 1-ton flatbed truck once. I didn't care if it was pretty but it sure was solid.

Have you ever tried welding with an acetylene torch? I found that welding thin steel with a small torch was a lot easier than I imagined, easier than with either MIG or flux-core. The practice transferred nicely to TIG when I got that machine - the coordination between feeding the filler rod and applying heat was much the same.

Hey, some more photos from different angles would be great.

JKJ

[Dennis Ford]

Here are a couple of progress pictures.

Yes, planning the shapes was a challenge. I tried drawing the sides to scale and that was going to be too much work and I realized that even tiny errors in the beginning would cause major issues later if I depended on scale drawings. I then tried a mock-up with posterboard but it was not nearly stiff enough. I ended up making it in stages, planning each stage based on the end of the previous stage. "bent the steel so smoothly" is somewhat of an exaggeration, I found that wrapping a strip around a pipe and then stretching or tightening the bend as needed worked fairly well. Holding or clamping the metal in place for a series of tack welds also worked well.

I have done a little gas welding in the past but the oxy-propane that I am currently using does not work for that.