Hey, look! Another day where I failed to take a picture! How (not) awesome!
Doh!
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Author Archives: Tom Harold
Need a coupon?
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They call these things “coupons” in the welding world. They’re two-inch long pieces of eighth-inch thick steel. You just put two of them edge to edge longways, and then you weld them together. Then you frown at the result, throw it on the floor, and do another. You do this until you stop frowning at the result. It’s a little boring, but it’s kind of cool too. It’s a good way to consistently practice the exact same thing, so it’s easier to track your results and figure out what you might be doing wrong (or right!). This pile of coupons was made by yours truly from for pieces of four-foot long flat stock. I cut them up using a reciprocating saw one at a time. Oh sure, it would have been easier to use a band saw, but I don’t own one. For now long, noisy, and slow is the way I have to do these things. Fun, right? You’re jealous, admit it.
Mo Brown
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We opened for this band tonight, Jonathan Tyler and the Northern Lights. They were pretty cool. The sound guy told me they were kind of like the Black Crowes, and he was right. Pretty good show. Lots of times I’m too tired to stick around for anything like this, but they sounded cool, and the bass player was a real nice guy. This is their sometimes singer, Mo Brown, who works with them when she’s not doing her own stuff. This isn’t razor-sharp photo quality, but I liked the whole mood of the thing anyway.
Argh!
Missed one today. Sometimes it’s hard to keep things straight on a Friday, from work to the gig, and I forget what I need to get done in the meantime.
Over, and over, and over, and over, and…
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I keep practicing. After screwing up a number of welds on the sculpture itself, I figured I’d do a test piece like this and make a zillion practice welds (okay, ten or twelve) on it and see if that helped. The reason I didn’t try to take a better picture of the welds here is because they’re pretty crappy. You get the idea, though, that I’m doing this repeatedly. It’s not pretty, but it’s necessary. This is progress. In years past I would have thrown this all out and been really disgusted, and maybe even given up on welding all together. This is the sort of thing that would have stopped me dead in my tracks, or would have kept me from just simply keeping at it for another hour or two that evening or the next day. It’s the sort of thing where I might have thrown it angrily in the trash (or on the floor), and just walked away for a week, a month, a year.
Well, I’m not overjoyed or anything, but at least I’m not setting unrealistic expectations for myself (maybe?). This is the way things are for me right now, and they will improve if I keep after it, and I’m going to keep after it!!!!
It seems so easy
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You think when you weld something that you just…weld it! Not so. What do we have here? Well, there’s a big sheet of steel on the workbench, and there are some two by fours on that, and there’s a special aluminum clamp on there, and then the standard quick-clamp holding the small “U” piece, and then at the far end is the clamp for the ground for the welder itself. Then, consider that all this stuff had to be lined up and steadied so that it wouldn’t fall or move while it was being welded. Then, of course, there’s always the chance that the weld itself is going to be lousy (in my case), and none of the aforementioned work will matter anyway.
Just…weld it. Sure!
Ack!
It appears I missed a photo today. I hate when I do that!
Melodiosa
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This thing is called a Sextet. What you’re looking at is only part of it. It looks like a paddle wheel from a river boat. It has SIX harmonicas mounted on it. There are little handles on the end of the frame that holds it all together, and you can spin it around to use the different harmonicas as you’re playing a song. They are used for old pop standards from the 20s and 30s and 40s. This sort of thing used to be much more popular than it is now. It’s impressive to see someone really work one of these things over.
The same, but different
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Here is a view of the sculpture that I started in my steel fabrication workshop a few weeks ago. Yep, pretty much the same sort of stuff I’ve been doing on copper, but I’ve gone a couple sizes up in marble diameter, and it’s made out of steel. This thing is physically far larger than anything I’ve tried to do with copper, which is kind of fun and kind of ridiculous. I like it!
The Miller has landed!!!
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It’s here! It arrived in all its Miller Blue glory! I have been patient. I have been good. I have been selling things to get this thing, and now I have this thing!!!! I got the notice in the mail yesterday that they’d tried to deliver it, and first thing this morning I ran over to the post office with my little orange piece of paper to claim my own personal lottery prize.
Isn’t it cool????? ISN’T IT?!?!?!!? (I know, it’s a blue box, but just…lemme have my moment. I didn’t have a knife to cut off the zip tie around the handle, but I had to capture it in all its just-arrived glory.)
Just wait until I get this thing home and opened up!!! JUST. YOU. WAIT! Cool stuff is about to happen, kids! I’m tellin’ ya, something huge is on the horizon here!