My latest is another example of the fact that I'm not much of a welder -- but I never let that stop me from 'going big.'
There's been a separate thread on the deck and the pergola already, but the steel part of it might interest someone here. (If you've already seen it, accept my apologies.)
I decided to make a cover for a deck I was building -- the idea was that it would hold shade fabric so my kids wouldn't get sunburned when they played on the deck.
I started with 500' of 1-1/4" square tubing. I have a Harbor Freight tubing roller and I got some square dies.
My math on what the arches
should have been was all wrong. In the end, it made sense to do them all at a 17'-radius bend.
Two of them together make a Gothic arch:
There was very little math involved in this. But a lot of it was just putting it into position and marking it.
The idea was to use the same pattern that stone arches are made with in cathedrals. I didn't have ladders high enough to do the full height of the thing, so I did the top part as it's own unit. This is 9' or 10' up in the air.
Here it is welded together. I also painted it while it was just the top section. But the problem was that this thing was 20' by 20', and it needed to levitate up about 7' so I could put the pillars in place.
My solution was to put up a mast -- or a boom. I took one of the round dies from the roll bender and used it as a pulley at the top. Then I put a hand-cranked worm-gear type winch at the base. The idea was going to be to find the center of the thing and lift it straight up. I also made a cradle to distribute the lifting force across as much of the assembly as possible so I didn't overstress it and break it.
It worked.
I got all the pillars welded and positioned under the roof before the sun went down.
Here you can see it all together. The support wires later came out.
And here it is covered with shade fabric.