Monday, September 22, 2014

Approval

I do seem to get myself into a tizzy submitting designs. Anyway, I got to the stage of drawing up a chalk version of my plan on a sheet of steel so that I can try parts against it as I make them and also tack weld some "walls" onto it to get the final fit OK. 

Having done that I contacted the client with some sketches and photos of my ideas and have now got the go ahead for the first two grilles. But I changed the top intersection of bars after doing another experiment to try out a split and expanded tenon at the part where the vertical bars intersect with the horizontals. A hole is punched and drifted into a rectangle shape in the horizontal bar. I stamped a shoulder into the vertical bar and then drew it down into a straight section the right size to fit through the hole and then slit it into two forks and drew those down further leaving some meat on the end to make into little flats. After straightening the two lobes of the forked tongue to fit through the mortice hole I then bent them back on the bar to hold the set firmly in place.
I am not sure of my skill set as yet, so I may end up making the verticals in sections to be welded into one piece for the final assembly, but I would like to keep these joints as physical connections, not just welds.

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Drifting

I am working on ideas for a series of iron window grilles to be mounted on the interior of five windows. The client seemed interested in having glass incorporated in the design and when I saw pictures of some work done by a friend starting out with art adventures I thought the marbles he was using might provide a solution.
I have been practicing slitting and drifting bar to house the marbles. The bar below is 25mmx9mm and I drew it down in some sections to about 17mm and 21 so that the different sized holes I wanted to drift would have similar sized walls.
I watched some videos on you tube and made some slitting punches and drifts.
This bar is my second go.





Here are the two slitting punches and one of the drifts with the bar after having the slits drifted out to three different sizes.



With the marbles laid in the holes on the bench it didn't look very impressive, so I used a few blobs of hot glue to hold them in place so that I could hold the thing up to the light as seen below. I expect I will be able to weld this test section into the finished piece somehow once I have done a bit more testing and finalised the design a bit more.