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From in front of the Harrison Center for the Arts. I see a bicycle wheel, part of a shovel, some rebar, a little screen wire, some plumbing pipe – so fun what you can do with castoffs!
Scrap Sculpture
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Category Archives: Photography
And this stuff again – keep it short
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And so it has come to this: my sum total of welding for the weekdays of this week thus far has been a solid ten minutes! Whatever. It was all I could do to put that time together for these piddly little welds, but I had to do it. I’m testing some settings and whatnot based on what the guys online are telling me to do. The two lines with the arrows written to the left are ones where I deliberately pulled the torch very far away from the work piece (very far = over 1/4″, btw), and watched to see what it would do. You can see that the weld looks funny, kinda gray, and that there are holes in it (porosity). That’s our lesson for today kids: keep a short arc length!
Thank you, and goodnight.
Grab some popcorn and make yourself comfortable
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…for I have plenty of movies to share. Yes, these are all VHS tapes, gathered during the dark ages before the DVD rose to prominence and guided us all with its shimmering light – which, of course, died out the moment that Blu Ray took over. But anyway, here are a few of my movies, plus some oddball random crap. See any favorites?
Charge! …or cash?
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Poor General Wallace, this certainly doesn’t seem like a fitting tribute to the man who wrote Ben Hur. At least they have an open mic night, though, right?
Can you hear me now?
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The way they make microphones now, they don’t have to be this big, but, man, they sure don’t look this cool anymore.
More welds
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I know, this is boring, but it’s what I’ve been doing! Can’t be helped. These look nice, right? This is what they should ALWAYS look like! Actually, the bead should be wider, but whatever. Point is they are clean and shiny looking, not rusty and full of holes. Problem is, at some point I’ll go to do this again, and for no reason that’s apparent to me, I’ll end up with rust-looking rows of pitted metal. *sigh* Someday I’ll figure this out. I just have to keep trying.
March Madness
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My city hosted the final four this year. I was playing a gig downtown on Saturday night of the big weekend just blocks from the arena. The gig started at 11pm, but parking and traffic was such a mess that it was strongly recommended that I go down there at 3:30 in the afternoon(!!!) simply to unload my gear! You can’t tell so much in this photo, but it was indeed pretty crazy. There were people everywhere (peek into the right and left corners of the photo), and traffic was kind of nuts. It was kind of cool, kind of “ugh.” I did get my stuff unloaded, though the whole thing was a little dicey. I basically called the bar from my cell and said, “I’m at the light right now in front of your bar. All the parking is blocked off, and I need to get my crap loaded in. Help!” They had someone open a side door for me, and I put my hazards on, literally ran into the bar (as well as you can run through drunken knots of people with fifty pounds of equipment), worried the entire time that they were already ticketing and towing my vehicle (it was said that the city was mercilessly towing everyone), threw my stuff on stage, and then ran back out to the car, jumped in, and sped off. It felt like a bank heist! I escaped with my own vehicle! Woohoo!
The Good, and the Ugly Bad
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I’ve been having issues lately with inconsistency in my welds. Things go very right, and then go oh so very wrong. Here’s an unfortunate example. These two sets of tests were done minutes apart, with no changes on my part, or none that I could perceive. Not sure what I’m doing wrong here. It’s very frustrating. I’m emailing people, asking at online forums. I’m working on it. Hopefully I’ll figure it all out before I decide to set the whole thing out in the driveway and back over it repeatedly. I kid – sort of.
On the up side, and totally unrelated to welding, I realized the other day that if you go to Google and type in rollingballsculpture like that – as all one word – my blog is the second search result, which is kind of cool.
Colors, colors, colors
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These things are fun. I miss playing with them. These, and the pencils. I need to make some phone calls. It’s been too long.
YESSSSS!!!!! Victory!!!!!
Got it!!! I know this doesn’t look like much. It looks like some grubby little gray sticks, but I assure you that this is some of the most gorgeous crap I have turned out in weeks! It’s not perfect, but, man, it’s MUCH better than it has been for months! And, really, the thing is, although I have made some good welds previously, this time I was able to repeat the process seven times! THAT is progress! And…AND!!! – when I grabbed them and wiggled them in all kinds of directions, and nothing broke off!!! SOLID!!! That is what we want!!!!
That stuff written above the practice piece are the settings on the welder for the amperage and the size of the tungsten electrode that I used to make these welds. I thought I’d never forget it, wouldn’t need to write it down, but then it occurred to me that weeks ago I’d done some welds that looked just as good as these, but hadn’t written anything down, and then I spent weeks trying to get back to this, so, can’t hurt, right?
Anyway, I could bore you with a long story about how I figured all this out, but let’s just say I practice, and practiced, and practiced, and practiced, and in between I asked for a lot of help and did a bunch of research. Now, finally(!!) I can do some solid work of which I will be proud, and which I can use to make decent sculpture. This type of welding right here is the basis upon which all my work is done, so having achieved this I have an excellent starting point from which to grow.
In short, this is really awesome. Really, really, really awesome!!!! Woot, says I.