Gas Welding Project

Spring 2022

One of my favorite creative endeavors was my second assignment for my Three & Four Dimensional Media class. We were tasked with developing an adaptation of our first assignment which was a soldering project, and we were to construct this adaptation by gas welding 1/4 inch diameter steel stock instead of soldering copper wire. Gas welding, or oxyacetylene welding, required us to learn many safety measures since we would be dealing with an open flame and heating the metal to extreme temperatures, A LOT hotter than soldering (we’re talking about 10 times hotter). The welding flame would be getting up to around 3200 degrees Celsius (a little over half the temperature of the sun!) instead of the soldering pen tip getting up to around 350 degrees Celsius. We had to wear a lot of flame resistant protection such as a leather jacket, leather gloves, flame resistant pants and shoes, and have long hair tied back. We also had to wear special goggles that would protect our eyes from the intense light and heat of the welding flame.

In order to get the flame up to these extreme temperatures, we had to make sure the pressures of the oxygen and acetylene valves were at the correct setting, we had to turn the oxygen and acetylene knobs a certain amount to open the valves, use a sparker to light the torch, then we had to increase the amount of oxygen until the flame turned from an orange duck-tail shape to a straight blue flame with a short white flame at the tip of the torch. Too much oxygen would cause the flame to snuff out, so we had to be careful not to overshoot. At the same time, we wanted to get to the short white flame as quickly as possible because the longer the orange flame was burning, the more soot it would release into the air and get all over your skin and clothes. Only the white flame would be hot enough to melt the steel, so it was necessary to attain this flame. It took a bit of practice, but I was eventually able to get to the point where I could get to the white flame in just a few seconds based on muscle memory. If anything went wrong, it was important not to panic, but to simply turn both knobs on the torch to close valves. This would cut off the fuel source and put out the flame immediately in an emergency situation.

Since I needed to make a larger scale adaptation of my soldering project (and I was using much thicker material and a more complicated fusing process), I chose to modify the design for my welding project by removing the “eye” in the center to make it more simple and less crowded. I decided to keep the two triangular pyramids, but I added another triangle in between them to act almost like a divider between them. I decided to connect the two pyramids to the triangle by putting my revolving arcs between them, similar to what I did in my soldering project. This created a cool illusion that the triangle was floating in between the two pyramids.

To start building this structure, I measured out the steel rods needed for the two pyramids and cut them to size on the band saw. To make the arc pieces, I used a special rod bending machine that could produce curves with a wide range of radii for various round rods. To keep the radii of the arcs consistent, I only curved one big piece of rod and cut it up to create many arcs. This ensured that all of my arcs had the same degree of curvature. I used the grinder to shape the ends of the pieces so that they would have a higher contact area at the ends where they would be touching each other to minimize the gaps and to avoid using a lot of filler while welding.

As for the welding, I used giant magnets to hold the pieces in place, just like I used clay and the helping hand apparatus to hold the copper pieces in my soldering project.

To perform the welding action, I adjusted my torch to the white flame and got the tip of the torch really close to the metal so that the white flame was touching it, and I worked the torch in a stirring motion to heat the metal to its melting point evenly. It was necessary to lean in close to the tip of the torch so I could see when the steel started melting. The pressure of the gas exiting the torch tip was enough to push the molten metal around to fill all the crevices of the joint for a proper weld.

To the right is an image of one of the pyramids just after I welded a joint, still glowing hot! Soon after each weld was complete, I quenched it in a bucket of water.

The welding was the honestly the easy part, in my opinion. Prepping, grinding, and setting up the pieces with the magnets was where I spent most of my time. It was a bit of an art in itself because I had to figure out how to prop some of the pieces up at odd angles (as seen with the arc to the left). But even though it was difficult, it was a fun challenge :)

It took a while, but I eventually set up and welded all six of the arc pieces which completed my project! Here is the final result next to my soldering project, below!

I am extremely happy with how the final result turned out as it was quite a technically challenging design. I love testing my skills and doing ambitious projects, and it’s always fun to see them come to life. Not a lot of people can say that they’ve done some old fashioned oxyacetylene gas welding, but now I can!