hi welcome to well.com I'm Beau wiggington and today we
are going to be making three different types of signs so let's get after it
all right so some of the materials we are going to be using today this is a
3 8 Round we're going to be using to attach one sign to this big slab of wood over here
we're also going to be making all of our signs out of 13 gauge hot rolled steel
um there's sheets that I picked up Little scraps that'll work perfect for the signs we're about
to make first thing we're going to have to do is get all of the mill scale off of our material but
before I go ahead and pick up my grinder I want to go ahead and put in these bad boys this is my
hearing protection it's the isotunes free uh thing I like about them is just little earbuds as soon
as I pop them out they connect to my phone and they protect my hearing so let's get to grinding
here I'm using a benchmarks abrasive 60 grit flap disc to get this Mill scale off
all right so something we need
so whenever you heat up metal it is going to compress it so or Shrink it
and so what's happening as you can see I just used the flat disc to take off this
Mill scale and the heat from that is already starting to cause a little bit of distortion
um this one we are going to be just tracing the letters out with MIG welding just laying beads
to give it kind of an embossed feel so when we are welding it we are going to make sure we have
it clamped down real tight to another piece of thicker metal to help soak up some of that heat
and fight the Distortion so this is the first sign we're going to be working on it is for a
local singer-songwriter her name is Jesse dunks and we're going to be doing an embossed texture
on this so we're going to actually use the weld bead to outline these letters to give it just kind
of a cool standoffish texture and she could put it right on her merch stand but before we do that we
are going to dial in our machine with this other piece just to make sure we get the right bead
so when I dialed in the MIG machine I set my wire feed speed to 180 and my volts to
17. I ended up turning it up to 17.5 and 190 just to get it a little smoother but
I wanted the bead to sit on top of the metal for this to really give it that embossed look
another thing that you want to be careful of is as you're doing this since we are
not burning it super hot it is going to get your nozzle dirty so make sure
you're cleaning that out so you don't end up welding your nozzle to your contact tip
I also sprayed the sign down with some anti-spatter to make the little BBS that
get stuck on there easy to get off when we're cleaning it up later on
So today we're going to be using the Lincoln Electric Tomahawk it's the 375 air we're just
going to be doing some Quick Cuts with this cutting out our letters
so with this machine you can really tell if you're moving too fast because you're going to see
those Sparks shooting out in front so that was a reminder to myself every time I saw that slow down
and just keep that pace it'll cut nice and clean I also found out I turned it up just a little bit
as I was going through because I felt like I just needed a little extra amperage to make a clean cut
another thing is the direction that you're traveling you can see as I'm cutting out
some of these letters I'm going up so the line is right in front of me that is a lot
easier to see than dragging it towards me so just a little tip if you're cutting things
on a line make sure that line is in front of you so you can have a nice clear view of it
foreign just like with the last sign we are trying to follow those lines
cutting it out making sure we're moving at the correct travel speed
one thing to remember when you are doing any kind of plasma cutting you want to
have some sort of eye protection and this auto darkening hood that I have on right
now has Shades meant for cutting and Welding so I switched it down to The Cutting mode
we've got all of our signs cleaned up cut out ready to roll now we're getting down
to the mounting phase so how I'm going to mount this sign to this wood slab is I've made these
little posts out of the 3 8 rounds I'm going to attach them on here on the back and then
I'm going to drill holes that we're going to just glue them right into those holes foreign
so we're installing some lights on the back of our signs here these are just
LED strips that actually glue right to the back of the sign this is going to reflect
off of that wood slab we have behind here to really make these letters pop
so how I went about attaching this I drilled 3 8 holes into the slab
and we simply just pressed it into a nice snug fit
this last signed the thing we're going to do to give it a little bit of depth we're going to be
making the letters stand up off of the back that we cut out so we can have that light seeping out
so what I did I cut down those 3 8 rounds down to little standoff posts that I'm going to mount on
the back of these letters so it'll end up giving it a nice little standoff that that light can leak
out we're going to actually offset it a little bit to give it even more of a 3D look so with the
D we do run into the negative space so what I'm using is some 3 32nd TIG wire that I'm going to
just kind of tack on to hold that in place we're not going to be moving this around a lot and it's
just going to be a placeholder so it just would keep that negative space behind the offset letter
for this sign I want to make sure these letters are nice and crisp
so I'm taking a flap wheel to the edges to remove any draws and also any jagged
lines that might be left over from cutting it out with the plasma cutter
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last thing we're going to do we're going to hit it with an acid that is going to darken up the
metal I found using it on Mill scale gives it a really cool texture and afterwards we're going
to really make it pop with some Scotch right so I'm going to go ahead and spray this on
after we apply that acid wash it is going to darken it up and I'm just using some Scotch right
here to kind of clean up any rust or lighten it up in any spaces I kind of want foreign
is going to be install the lights as well and we are going to be using another LED strip but we're
going to be weaving it in and out of this expanded metal that I attached to the back of the sign
all right we have completed our signs we put some Led strips on the back to give it a little pop of
color with the lights and we have our intro sign with Jesse dunks an intermediate one with bruise
Rock and then also an advanced sign over here for Linda's a bar and if you have any questions feel
free to leave a comment down below until next time I'm Beau wigginton we'll see you out there
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