College Life: Welding / Metal Fabrication
4:59:00 PM |
| You see that black spot on my glove? Yeah I burned it because I got too close to the torch. That piece of leather is completely solid now.. |
Welding class was never really on my radar... I just never thought of my self as the spark spitting, flaming torch wielding type... BUT THEN.
Yeah,.. here I am. Standing in the shop wondering how the hell I'm supposed to pass this class without killing or fatally injuring myself or one of my classmates... who is incidentally standing in front of the oxyfuel station... which if mistreated could either explode or turn into a missile speed projectile... it's cool.
Anyhow, somehow I'm here... and I'm kind of loving it. People who know what I want to do in the future would probably understand why this might come in handy. But besides that, think of all the things I could make. I could make furniture, tools, racks to hold plants or clothes, basically anything I wanted out of metal. Those tables up there on the left? Yeah, my professors made those. So. freaking. cool.
For our first project, we're supposed to make our own chipping hammer, which we'll be using later on in the class to chip off slag when we learn how to ARC weld. That's my first design.
But then I realized that it was going to be way too top heavy.weak/unwieldy so I moved some things around to make it stronger. Like putting the largest chuck of metal in the center of the hammerhead instead of the top, and welding more supports in the middle and between the handle and head... hopefully it works.
Since I have a lot of point parts in my hammer, I had to do a lot of grinding and lathing. It smells weird after a while. Secretly I wonder how much steel dust I'm breathing in.
This is me stalling before I actually try to burn things and heat form my handle. It was actually not that bad and really fun.
TA- freaking- DA. Mia can bend metal and burn things without dying. And maybe actually make something in the process.
meant to keep uploading progress onto the ART blog so since I'm doing that anyways I'll probably do updates here too... Yay I actually get to blog for a grade.
2 comments
Haha knowing your excessive amount of clumsiness, this would seem pretty dangerous heh. I'm happy it went well and you had a new experience!
ReplyDeleteWelding can be a lot of fun and isn't as dangerous as you'd think as long as you take the proper safety precautions. Most importantly, welding takes a lot of practice. I also learned how to weld in a college course and was worried because it was challenging. In the end, everything was fine and learned a cool new skill!
ReplyDeleteBrandi Bradley @ Rotax Metals