The Shadow Vault

A Little Embarrassing to Admit...

Yes, I know this is another paragraphless post... skrew you humans... :) Probably best to just ignore me. :)

So, I have been learning to weld real well... I had taken a class freshman year where I learned braze welding first semester, and then second semester, I did some of the arc welding stuff, stick welding... with the electrode thing... Yeah, but people always stole my metal so I didn't do it all and I failed the second semester. Anyway, but I had some experience in that. And then I moved up here, and I have done a bunch of welding on the wire feed welder. And that stuff is a lot easier to do than the stick welding... And now I have more experience doing that than the stick... Since I made a whole lamp... Which reminds me again that I need to find some sheet metal for the lampshade... Uhm, so yeah. I havn't got much practice with the stick welder, and I usually have/had a hard time striking an arc anyway. So today, I was supposed to go up onto the scaffold 25 feet high, and weld some stuff together... Well, I was supposed to yesterday, but the welder was broken... Uhm, So I go up there this morning, about 45 mins after I woke up(got up at 08:00, got up there prolly about 08:45), after I got breakfast(a donut, toast, and scrambled eggs... mmm, cheese.)... SO I go up there, get set up/dressed, figure out how to use the mask(gotta turn it on... it detectsd bright light and turns dark to protect when you strike an arc so that you can see when you go to strike the arc, and not blind yourself... anyway... it's supposed to be better than lifting the helmet when you want to see and putting it down right before you go to strike...). Anyway, so I get the mask working, and I go to strike an arc, and it won't strike... I try a few times, eventually get a spark... By the way... what I am doing is basically intentionally making the electricity arc from the rod to the metal, like... say, if you were to accidentally touch a screwdriver to a live wire and a ground, and it melted the screwdriver... only on purpose... it's like intentionally doing what I usually avoid... anyway... So, I get some sparks, I know that I have ground up there... just hard to strike... so I keep trying, get an arc, get a little bit of weld done, and the rod sticks, I break it off(I know a better way now...) and I try again, and I get a few little welds across... enough I guess to hold that peice... Not really, but I was gonna do a bunch more welds anyway. So Yeah... BTW, what is embarrassing to admit is that I suck ass at stick welding... Oh, and BTW, can't do wire feed up there I guess because the wire feed isn't powerful enough... not high enough amperage. Anyway, So I go and I try to strike on another part... it doesn't work... I try to strike on the previous part, and so I make the people down on the ground(father and grandfather) make sure I have a good ground contact... (Oh, and ground is required so the electrons have somewhere to go after they go from my rod to the metal... I guess most people understand the cyclic nature of electricity...) And they make sure I do...make a better one in fact... and then I realise that the tip of my rod is dirty(covered in flux) so I get a new rod, and then I can make messy sparky messes just fine again... yay... yeah... So then I can't get a good arc to run and so my grandfather comes up and just does it... no problem... he was really shaky, and made the whole scaffold wobble the whole time, but... whatever... So. Yeah, thats all... i'm a little tired from all that standing and climbing.... I think I have to try to weld more later... hopefully with the wire feed... I like welding... Oh, and once I can, I will get you guys all a picture or two of my crap-o lamp... And if you wanna buy it, lemme know! :-D it's prolly far too expensive for any of MY (few) readers... Like $200-300, I think it was gonna be... I dunno... 95% made by me(only 25% of the design is by me tho...)... (the other 5% is the lamp parts we purchased.)

Anyway. Thats enough rambling for now. Have a good day.

-Sub-Element