No Longer A Completely Useless Welder

So while I am improving the quality of my code, I still have to get out of the house occasionally and do some non-family-related stuff once per week. This week I didn’t really have a project, so I decided to try to go from a completely useless welder to a less useless welder.

I had taken the basic safety training, and although I kind of liked how those welds came out, the next time I tried to weld something (The bucket for the toy excavator from the sandbox) all that happened was that sparks flew everywhere and some random blobs of melted metal got stuck to the bucket.

So it was with great humility I started finding pieces of scrap metal to try to get some non-ugly welds. The results were mixed…

Welding sheets of metal together, however, is not something I expect to do a lot of in the future. Instead, if I ever do any real welding, I expect that I will be attaching square metal tubes together to form some form of cage och skeletal structure. So I found a small piece of square pipe that I cut into pieces and welded together.

Looking just a bit better….

Encouraged by this result, I found a larger square tube, cut it into larger pieces and did the same thing again. This is starting to look a bit less useless…

Finally, an angle grinder can really hide some serious crimes. I have now been told that grinding the welds down this far will probably seriously weaken the joints, so I should probably leave a bit more metal, but for now, aesthetics won out 😀