Welcome to another fabrication video.
This time we will be making lots of circle and putting them together into a trellis for
my garden.
This epsiode is graded in high dynamic range and I will have some amazing slow motiong
welding shots later.
So stay tuned.
We got 6 full length of 1/2in x 3/16in mild steel bars; that's 120 feet or roughly 37
meters.
Some basic high-school math is needed to figure out the correct length.
We are trying to make as many circles as possible on a given mandril and also need a little
bit of extra to have something to hold on.
Since the bar is quite thin we can do all the bending cold.
The basic idea to bend the mild steel bar around the tube as many times as it fits.
The jig has a little holder welded next to the tube that holds the bar.
In this case, our leg vise is not all that stable and we use the weight of a second person
to stabilize it.
After bending, we end up with four circles that we need to cut apart and then weld together.
The trick with the band saw is to cut one circle at a time and not try to cut them all
at once.
We need four different ring sizes and for each of them we calculate how much material
to cut so that we can create as many rings at once as possible.
For this video, I had a lot of extra help.
Tony was visiting from Chicago and Nils Anderssen was visiting from Norway.
When bending around our makeshift mandrel, we need to keep the bends as tight and even
as possible so that the resulting rings are all of the same size.
As we are essentially winding up a spiral, some adjustment is needed to bring the ends
back together.
Some hits with the hammer while clamping the lower end of the ring in a vise usually does
the trick.
We are slowly working our way up to the larger ring sizes and am starting to run out of space
in the shop.
The longer the initial bar the more space we need around the mandrel and we are sort
of navigating the obstacles that are getting in the way.
Finally, we are getting to our largest ring size and of that we just need a couple but
the technique is slighly different as you will see.
After having made 30 - 40 rings, we need to weld them together.
This is actually easier with some help to prevent the ends from coming apart.
We are careful to just weld from the outside to make cleanup on the belt sander easier.
Once we have created all the rings for the trellise, we go back to our master plan and
fit them to our layout.
Placing the rings is pretty fast but making all the little connection pieces will be somewhat
annoying.
When welding, we will only weld from the top and the bottom but not from the sides.
The trellise is not going to support anything really heavy.
After we completed welding one side, we flipped the trellise over and supported it on two
saw horses.
To give you a sense how welding looks like for the person operating the welding machine,
we tried to take a couple of shots through the helmet.
It looks a little bit odd but conveys a different perspective.
Slow motion and high dynamic range make welding look almost magical.
I hope you enjoy what you see.
I am probably over indulging here but I could watch this for hours.
With the aperture wide open, depth of field make the sparks appear quite peaceful.
After all the welding of the rings is done; it's time for another round of clean up with
the angle grinders.
Slow motion turns this into abstract art as well.
Alright enough with that.
We are basically done and just need to figure out how to mount the whole contraption.
We think that three legs made form square bar should be
sufficient to hold it.
What is left after that is to weld the legs onto a plate that can be fixed in some concrete.
Because the trellise is quite tall and the material very thin, it's not completely self
supporting.
We are also welding on a bracket in the back that can be used to support the
trellise against a house wall.
That's it.
The trellise now just needs to be painted and then installed.
I hope you enjoyed what you saw and if you want to see more please subscribe to my channel.
Also many thanks for people who have joined me on Patreon.
See you next time.