This is a little late, but it figures into some things that I’m going to be doing here on the site, so I’m going to go ahead and pop back in time a little and delve into my welder and how it came to be.

I had been wanting to add a welder to the tool collection in the garage for a while.  I had projects piling up that I was not working on because they needed welding here and there and I couldn’t do it myself.  It was easier to just put them off and not work on them.   It ended up being much easier to do something else than coordinate with someone else to come weld the various projects up for me.  Last year I figured I might want to go ahead and seriously look into getting a welder so I could tackle some of those projects on my own.  I figured I was expanding the capabilities of the garage, as well as expanding my skills.  Maybe welding was a logical next step.

So I started looking around for info.  When I started doing research around the web in early 2007 to try to figure out which welding machine I wanted to add to the tools in the garage,  I was confronted with a massive amount of information.  Some relevant, some not.  And as I expected, everyone had their own opinions on brands and models and most of those folks are pretty strong in their opinions.  Those pages got tossed right away, I can form my own opinions.  And brand isn’t really critical to me as long as the tool will do the job I wanted it to do.  I tried to then sort through all of the rest of the info out there to distill it down to facts that were useful to me, rather than deal with all the marketing hype and opinions.  Now during all of that looking I noticed ONE constant thing.  It seems that all of the guys on the welding boards and the car boards all had the same basic bias.  Small 110V welders stink.  Period.  End of discussion.  Don’t even bother.  To hear these people tell it, anything that plugs into a normal house plug is totally worthless and a waste of space and money.  This I just couldn’t understand as that market segment reaches from a $79.00 unit at Harbor Freight, to big name machines that are almost $1000.  If they sucked so bad, and they didn’t really work, why did everyone (Including the major players) waste their time making them?  I’ve worked with professional companies that had high end gear that just did not make anything for the entry level.  I wondered why that the big boys would waste their time with a product that wasn’t apparently worth the effort.  With that in the back of my mind, I figured I needed to define what I was going to use the machine for.  Figuring that may help me narrow down the options a little.

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Its ALIVE!

Actually its not, but that’s much more impressive sounding than the other options.  At any rate, the roof section of the trellis is now complete.  The design is done and all of the welds have been finished and dressed.  All that is left on the roof panel is welding the brackets on to connect it to the other pieces, and that cannot be done quite yet as the other pieces arent finished yet.  Brackets are the last thing on the list before its all painted and installed.  Now I’m on to working on the front upright panels.  When I get some progress on those, I’ll post photos of those as well.

For now, I present the finished roof panel.

In and amongst all of the other little projects, I’m still plugging away at the trellis.  Having been occupied with other things since we last posted, I decided it was time to get back out there and make some sparks.  The last time I was out working I managed to mangle the saw I was using to trim the steel to length, so late last week I stopped while I was out and picked up an inexpensive chop saw.  And while its not a highly precise saw, its alot more accurate than freehand with a jig saw.

So I made my way out to the barn and started on the large 2/3 of the roof section.  As I mentioned before, the design is inspired by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright.  This particular piece is roughly divided into thirds.  The panel I worked on last time is a self contained panel.  The remaining two thirds are grouped together into a larger panel, which is divide into offset quarters.  Which in plain english means ALOT of measuring and re-measuring.  After several hours out there today, this is where we stand.  I Have the lower 2 quadrants of the design done.  Which are visible on the left of this photo.  You can see the two upper sections are still empty.  The design in those is more dense as the sections are smaller.  All told they both have 3 more large sections of tube and 3 thin strips of flat stock to go.  That will be either later in the week or sometime next week, depending on schedules.  Once the design is finished then I get to move on to the front panels, which will hopefully work up a little faster.  They are smaller, so I’m hopeful.

Trellis progress, 11/8/08

About a year ago I picked up a welder for the shop.  I figured it would be handy to have for the various automotive things that I seem to be doing more of.   Since I got it, it has been pretty handy for automotive related things.   I recently decided to see what I could do that was a little more artistic.  We are in need of a trellis in the back yard to support a rose bush that is getting out of hand, so I figured I could whip something up that would work and look decent in the process.  As these things tend to do, the project ended up balooning into a much larger undertaking than I had planned.  The trellis is going to have 3 main panels and plain posts in the back to support the roof.  I have 2 7′ x 3′ panels for the front for the rose to climb, and then the roof panel which is 6′ x 10′.  We elected to continue the front panel design over to the roof so it would be visible from the ground.  So the roof panel is decorative as well.  The design is loosely based on the Frank Lloyd Wright style.  Angular and squared panels, without obvious symmetry.
This is the first third of the roof panel.  I’ll add more photos here as I progress.  For my first major project like this, its coming along nicely.

Roof section - Trellis