Finally.  After hours and hours and hours of cutting, grinding, welding, cleaning, priming and painting, the trellis is finally finished…   Almost.  :)  All of the parts are completed and painted.  All that is needed now is to set all the parts in place, drill my last few holes and bolt it all together.  With any luck, assembly will be today and finished photos will follow.

For now, I have a couple of photos of one of the finished front panels, and a shot of the painted front panels.  Painting of the last panel was finished after dark last night, so photos of the roof panel and the rear bracket in  final paint will have to be taken later today.

All in all I’m very pleased with how the panels turned out, and I’m very excited to see it all assembled and in place.  Overall I was very impressed with the capabilities and the ease of use of the Millermatic 140 Welder.  I’m planning on writing up a full review in the next few weeks.  But I’ll tell you right now that for a little 110V welder that you can plug in almost anywhere, its a very capable machine.

Onward to the photos.

I’ve moved on to the front panels of the trellis/arbor/large steel Rose structure.  (I’ve gotten comments from poeple that insist its not a trellis due to the roof, which makes it an arbor.  Contrasting opinions seem to think its not an arbor as it doesnt span a path like a traditional arbor does.)  Regardless of terminology, I’ve moved on to the front panels.  Which are coming along nicely.  They are an intersting puzzle as they should work up faster as they are smaller, but I have to slow a little as I’m making both of them identical.  So far they seem to be taking the same amount of time as the roof section.  The speed increase that comes with practice and a better saw to rough cut the pieces, is being offset by the need to slow down to double check measurments from piece to piece to make sure they match.   I’m still aiming for a big finish for Christmas, but it may be tight.

These arent the most current photos, but they do show some of the progress on the front panels.  I’ll be adding some more updated photos when I’m out there working on them next.

front panel sections

This is a little late, but it figures into some things that I’m going to be doing here on the site, so I’m going to go ahead and pop back in time a little and delve into my welder and how it came to be.

I had been wanting to add a welder to the tool collection in the garage for a while.  I had projects piling up that I was not working on because they needed welding here and there and I couldn’t do it myself.  It was easier to just put them off and not work on them. :)  It ended up being much easier to do something else than coordinate with someone else to come weld the various projects up for me.  Last year I figured I might want to go ahead and seriously look into getting a welder so I could tackle some of those projects on my own.  I figured I was expanding the capabilities of the garage, as well as expanding my skills.  Maybe welding was a logical next step.

So I started looking around for info.  When I started doing research around the web in early 2007 to try to figure out which welding machine I wanted to add to the tools in the garage,  I was confronted with a massive amount of information.  Some relevant, some not.  And as I expected, everyone had their own opinions on brands and models and most of those folks are pretty strong in their opinions.  Those pages got tossed right away, I can form my own opinions.  And brand isn’t really critical to me as long as the tool will do the job I wanted it to do.  I tried to then sort through all of the rest of the info out there to distill it down to facts that were useful to me, rather than deal with all the marketing hype and opinions.  Now during all of that looking I noticed ONE constant thing.  It seems that all of the guys on the welding boards and the car boards all had the same basic bias.  Small 110V welders stink.  Period.  End of discussion.  Don’t even bother.  To hear these people tell it, anything that plugs into a normal house plug is totally worthless and a waste of space and money.  This I just couldn’t understand as that market segment reaches from a $79.00 unit at Harbor Freight, to big name machines that are almost $1000.  If they sucked so bad, and they didn’t really work, why did everyone (Including the major players) waste their time making them?  I’ve worked with professional companies that had high end gear that just did not make anything for the entry level.  I wondered why that the big boys would waste their time with a product that wasn’t apparently worth the effort.  With that in the back of my mind, I figured I needed to define what I was going to use the machine for.  Figuring that may help me narrow down the options a little.

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Its ALIVE!

Actually its not, but that’s much more impressive sounding than the other options.  At any rate, the roof section of the trellis is now complete.  The design is done and all of the welds have been finished and dressed.  All that is left on the roof panel is welding the brackets on to connect it to the other pieces, and that cannot be done quite yet as the other pieces arent finished yet.  Brackets are the last thing on the list before its all painted and installed.  Now I’m on to working on the front upright panels.  When I get some progress on those, I’ll post photos of those as well.

For now, I present the finished roof panel.

In and amongst all of the other little projects, I’m still plugging away at the trellis.  Having been occupied with other things since we last posted, I decided it was time to get back out there and make some sparks.  The last time I was out working I managed to mangle the saw I was using to trim the steel to length, so late last week I stopped while I was out and picked up an inexpensive chop saw.  And while its not a highly precise saw, its alot more accurate than freehand with a jig saw.

So I made my way out to the barn and started on the large 2/3 of the roof section.  As I mentioned before, the design is inspired by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright.  This particular piece is roughly divided into thirds.  The panel I worked on last time is a self contained panel.  The remaining two thirds are grouped together into a larger panel, which is divide into offset quarters.  Which in plain english means ALOT of measuring and re-measuring.  After several hours out there today, this is where we stand.  I Have the lower 2 quadrants of the design done.  Which are visible on the left of this photo.  You can see the two upper sections are still empty.  The design in those is more dense as the sections are smaller.  All told they both have 3 more large sections of tube and 3 thin strips of flat stock to go.  That will be either later in the week or sometime next week, depending on schedules.  Once the design is finished then I get to move on to the front panels, which will hopefully work up a little faster.  They are smaller, so I’m hopeful.

Trellis progress, 11/8/08