Desk Set of Steel

Tonight during welding, I played around with the plasma cutter. It was once believed that there were three states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas. This has been superceded. There's another: plasma. Plasma cutting turns the steel into plasma, and concentrated air blows it out of the way. So, your plasma cutting gun slices through solid steel like a knife going through butter.

I got out a sheet of diamond plate and had fun cutting some intricate shapes out with the plasma cutter. And an idea took form: I'd weld these surreal shapes onto a rectangular sheet of the diamond plate.

And so I did, using MIG (Metal Inert Gas Welding). I've totally got the hand of MIG. (Next challenge: TIG, or Tungsten Inert Gas Welding, used for stainless steel and aluminum!) And I think the thing I made looks pretty great. And it's not art! It has a practical use! Okay, so that use occurred to me only after I had made it, but still... I'm going to use it as a mail holder, sitting on my desk, to hold all these bills I can't afford to day in the hopes that one day I'll be able to pay them. I brought it home and added it to my little collection of things I'd made in welding. There's the slab of steel with some spattery beads on it that I made on the very first night--I use this as a paperweight; and the trapezoidal dish thingy that I made after I had finished up the firewood rack and still had an hour to kill.

So I've got this really cool little desk set: a mail rack, a paperweight, and a vessel to hold... uh... paperclips or whatever.

This weekend, I'll take some pictures and post them up here. It's been too long since I dropped some pictures onto Singletails. Plus, I wanna show off.

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