I have already described how I painted this bowl in a previous post. In that post I promised to "tell the story of my own idiocy." So here is my official, "I fail a lot too, so you have no real excuse not to try making things, we all fail, just do it" post for this month.
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| Good idea, bad execution - just add some spray paint. |
I looked at how-to videos on YouTube and thought, "Hey, that's simple enough - I can do that." Well I couldn't do that, but I do have some legitimate reasons why this bowl isn't as pretty as the ones on Pinterest.
First, I only had a few hours of stick welding experience. They had taught me how to do horizontal, vertical and overhead tee-welds using the same thick stock and forgiving 7018 rods. We had about half of a class left free at the end of the short course and the teacher said we could do our own projects.
I had some washers that were too big to use in even my largest jewelry or other projects, so I said I wanted to make a washer bowl. The teacher advised against it but let me do it anyway, perhaps knowing that public failure after a strong warning is also a good teacher.
The teacher, a patient and skilled mentor, knew that I should wait until I had access to the MIG machines in the next round of classes. The YouTube videos also used MIG. But I could lay down a 6" multi-pass bead so obviously I could do anything.
Hah!
The poor suffering teacher did the best he could, handed me some 6013s and warned me that they would sputter and splatter and be generally more fussy than the 7018s, especially on coated metal.
He also mentioned that the washers were much thinner than the stock we had been taught on, so I needed to be careful not to burn through the washers. He also warned that the washers were of various thicknesses, so joining thin to thick ones would be different than the single thickness plates I was used to. And he also noted that welding a tiny joining face would feel different than the solid metal plates we had practiced on.
Sure, sure.... dude I can lay down a bead 85% of the time and barely stick it on starting. I'm good to go.
He was right. I was wrong. The bowl sucks. I learned a lot.
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| First time welding metals of various thicknesses and sizes plus first time using 6013s gave... ummmmm... various levels of quality in the welds. You can see the results of my learning curve by comparing the upper right quadrant with the rest of the so-called bowl. |
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| All I have to do is use the same speed and settings as I did on the thick plate stock, right? Wrong... I burned through most of the first few tries before I even knew I had a spark. These thin washers don't act anything like what I was used to. |
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| Still not the prettiest welds, but at least I didn't burn away more metal than I deposited. |
Everything the teacher warned me about turned out to be accurate. You can tell which part of the bowl I started with. It's the part with drippy holes where the weld should be. As I started adding more washers though, I realized I just needed to tack them, not lay down a bead.
Be quick with the stick young grasshopper.
So most of my welding problems turned out to be personality flaws. Luckily for me, I am also stubborn.
But I own spray paint, so all is not lost..
The bowl is way too ugly to use inside, not even worth grinding down. It will never grace the table at a dinner party where I casually say, "Why yes, thank you... but I didn't buy it... I made it myself in my first welding class." Nope, not gonna happen.
But maybe if I add enough coats of paint I can find a place for the so-called bowl in a remote corner of the yard.
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| So if it's not good enough to display in bare metal, maybe some spray paint will help hide the errors. |
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| It's still not pretty enough for use inside, but maybe add some sphagnum and some ferns, set it outside, way back in the corner of the yard where no one ever walks. |
If ivy is the best friend of bad architects, a large mass of ferns may become the best friend of a bad welder.
And just so you know, the teacher did come to look at the bowl and said, "Hmmm, that's not as bad as I thought it would be." He, of course, knew exactly where I started welding and where I started to understand just by looking at the welds. I think he was just happy that he had managed to teach me enough that I could learn from failures and adjust - not well, not fast - but still learn and adjust on the fly.
I might be an idiot, but the teacher is an extremely skilled welder and also a really good teacher. I also took the Intro to MIG class and learned a lot - both what I should do and, like this project, some things that I think should have worked but didn't.
I've made fun of myself a lot in this post. But I should point out that the teacher also helped me learn how to successfully weld basic components in a reasonably proficient way. Repetition, knowledge, examples, repetition and more repetition means that I can actually do some basic welds. I am grateful for his patience and help, his insistence that I stick to the basics until I could do them well, and then allowing me to fail in such a way that I learned WHY he insisted I do it a certain way to begin with.
Seeing the results of doing things both the right way and wrong way is good preparation for when I don't have an expert to ask before every weld - which should be very soon (hint).
And finally, to those five artist friends who keep talking about taking a welding class but never do (you know who you are) --- you see how bad I am at it and I've shared it in public. Now get over to the local community college or trade school and take the introductory class. It's cheap, it's fun and it's actually pretty easy if you follow directions.
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