15. Wildcard Week!
In this Wildcard week I tried to learn some of the basics of electrode welding.
I had always wanted to learn how to weld metal pieces together but never had the initiative to do so, so with this week and my final proyect's needs as an excuse, I took out my father's (very) old electrode welder, repaired its cables, cleaned it up and bought some electrodes from the hardware store.
In the hardware store I also purchased a pair of leather gloves and a welder's mask as protection equipment.
The electrode welder has a set of screws that serve as terminals of a multi-winding transformer, that take down the mains voltage (127V here in my country) to around 30 to 40 volts, but at a much higher current capability, which is the thing that actually melts things and fuses them together.
As I was going to weld a bunch of scrap metal I had lying around (hollow steel profiles), I chose the lowest setting on the machine (around 50 amps) and started doing my first tests on a pair of steel pieces, which to no one's surprise didn't turn out very well.
After practicing a bit more I was getting comfortable using the machine, so I tried a little proyect to try and master my welding skills as much as I could in a single day's work. So I chopped into four 30 cm pieces a rusty steel profile I found in the shop, using a metal cutting saw made this quite easy.
Now I had the metal pieces I used a right-angle vice to hold the pieces together while I welded them. The result was far from perfect, but was way better than my first attempts, and as an added bonus, it actually held up the pieces strongly together!
I continued this process until I had a cross-like assembly.
Once the cross was welded, I grinded the slag and weld buildup using an angle grinder, which left everything looking like the image. The grinding process really showed how bad my welding joints were, so I corrected them a little and grinded them again before moving to the next step.
The cross piece, with no real purpose other that to entertain my learning curiosity, sparked a little idea of how to make it useful; I mean, now that I've made it it's best that it turns out being useful than it being just trash at the end.
So I took out a 1-1/2" steel tube that also was scrap metal, and wanted to weld it vertically to the metal cross in order to do some kind of sign, just like the ones they use in parking lots and other reserved spaces:
So, with this idea in mind I just mounted the tube perpendicular to the cross' center using the same right-angle vice, then welded it along its circumference to the cross below it. Then, after finishing it with the angle grinder, it ended up looking like this:
I then just painted it black with some spray paint, and left the base as is:
