IDK, I have no clue where to put this crap. This is all the junk I made during my SIX WEEK course on cutting metal. With 20 other students. And one plasma cutter and two spottily working acetylene torches. So much of that class was spend doing fuck all. And some of it was spent wasting metal! The first one I made! this one was cut from a disk two inches diameter, so please excuse the six legged spider. Annd, the best one!
Miller Motte Technical College. In Madison, TN. Their welding course. Honestly, a pretty bad place to be. I had the money to pay off tuition without taking out a loan, but even that was a hassle and a half. For profit schools are bad news, and it's really hard to tell how much was dicking me around for extra cash muns and how much was just geujne incompetence. Either way, not fun.
o-o cool! I kinda want to see if the local community college has anything similar, but I think I'd rather start w metal clay, bc I'm more used to regular clay as a medium than just about anything other than thread. but then, they might not be at all similar, which is what has me stalled on going forward w any of this, since I just don't know enough about any kind of metal work any advice?
Wow, I'd never heard of metal clay before! Looks real neat! A cursory glance at wikipedia says that metal clay is aptly named! Texture and weight is pretty well likely to be new, on acounta all the metal, and getting used to the shrinkage when you fire it might take some practice. I've got no experience with it, but it looks pretty sweet. And sorry, I don't got much! My welding courses were basically just about how do industrial welding. Artistry didn't really come into it. I just got time to fuck around on my own cause our classes were overcrowded sometimes. I guess it depends what kinda stuff you wanna do what kinda stuff you should look for! Ceruleancynic on Tumble's talked some about making jewelry in high school shop class, so she might know more about that kinda stuff! Unless I'm mixing her up with someone else, haha.
I really want to work with metal clay at some point myself. Muffled sounds about gemstone settings...
Something that may one day be a shark! It's just sorta a head for now, tho. I think it's pretty okay for something I made up as I went along.
Was gonna make a new thread for welding but apparently I can necro this one instead! :D Today was my second day of welding class! It's been going really good so far. They started us out on stick, which is definitely trickier than the wire-fed we did at the one-day workshop in September, but I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. I spent the first half of the morning fucking up pretty bad until I noticed my machine was set to about 20 amps too high :P But by the end of the day I wasn't sticking out any more (in the welding sense not the social sense) and was striking an arc successfully on at least the second or third try every time! Still need to work on consistency and not burning the metal. I think we're starting on horizontal tomorrow? The instructor told us to read that section in the booklet, anyway. Gotta say I'm not looking forward to overhead stick welding when we eventually get to that. More than anything it reminds me of learning to drive. There's a bunch of things you have to keep in mind and different sensory inputs that all need processing at once, so if you're really nailing one thing you're pretty much guaranteed to be fucking up something else, and you can't just stop moving to see what's going wrong. But if it's like driving, there'll eventually be a moment when it all clicks together and becomes automatic. Hopefully that comes soon - I've been improving steadily as far as I can tell. The rest of the class is all guys, which I hoped might not be the case but was still expecting. They all seem alright, though! There are only eight of us. Most of them don't seem inclined to socialize much, or maybe they're just socially awkward. There's one kid who's talkative - he's nineteen, graduated high school last year and had a couple of miscellaneous jobs between then and now. We've commiserated about grocery store work! As for injuries, the worst thing so far is the fact that the gloves are thick enough to strain my little finger. Gotta do some grip strength exercises. There's also a bit of arc burn on my neck but as far as I can tell that's inevitable.
