Good materials for hobby/craft welding?

[VBO]

I've been welding for about a year now for sculptural purposes, one of my teacher's taught me and I immediately fell in love with MIG welding.
There's so many projects I want to take on, I want to do more sculptural welding but I'm not sure what kind of metal would be best.
I worked previously with salvaged metal, which I cleaned thoroughly, welded, then re-rusted. The first piece I made actually sold even though I had listed it as not-for-sale, and I've made a few small sculptures here and there.
Here's an image of the first piece I made

I'd like to work with things like gears, nuts, thick wire, rod, really anything but I'm not sure what's going to be adequate for MIG welding.

Any help, hints/tips?

 

[cumbriasteve]

Welcome to the forum, a few of the guys here are into the same thing, mild steel round bar is often the basic material used for a lot of the work but anything that will weld will work and salvaged parts can make some of the best sculptures.

Chunkolini has a good site of his work

www.artinsteel.co.uk

 

[GrahamGKD]

Hi VBO and welcome to the forum. I have had a good dabble with metal sculpture over the last 18 months or so, using a range of bar (round and square and the odd bit of flat) sheet and tube in both mild steel and stainless (316l and 304l). I understand a type of steel called corten is good for rusting, although I have never tried it myself. You can buy things like hollow balls here in the UK, which are handy, as are ball bearings for smaller eyes. Bits of welding rod are good for tentacles.

I haven't tried recycled bits myself but I do get the impression this is attractive to potential buyers, since we are encouraged to recycle everything these days (I get the impression there are one or two sculptors out there who advertise their stuff as recycled when a lot of the material looks new)?

As Cumbriasteve says, Chunkolini is the expert on here.
Good luck with it.

 

[VBO]

Thanks for the welcomes/advice.
I've got plenty of sketches that i think I will take with me when I hit up some hardware stores for supplies.
Cheers

 

[cumbriasteve]

Thanks for the welcomes/advice.
I've got plenty of sketches that i think I will take with me when I hit up some hardware stores for supplies.
Cheers

Do you not have scrapyards , car wreckers, recycling yards etc, there is such a range of bits and shapes available, imagination is all thats required.

 

[chunkolini]

Interesting stuff there.
if it is ferrous metal you can Mig weld it.
I have made sculptures using 1.6mm gas welding rods, you have to be very quick to get it to hold together and not melt all over the place.
I have used loads of motorbike chain and industrial drive chain, typerwiter type heads make great legs, cheap nasty tools are great to use, easy to shape and weld nicely. Fancier toold are not so easy as some of the harder steel crack horribly when welded.

Centipede, typewriter, pliers, bike chain.

Lizard, bike chain and lots of welding.
if you start playing about with welding chains soak them for a few days in keresene and then degrease them a few times. the fumes from burning dirty old oil at these temperatures are not healthy, the burning oil also ******s up the welds leading to porosity.

Or you can use the mig welder as a medium in itself.

I call this 'Over welding' a great result but absolutely vile to do. Build a rough armature of small bars and bits of scrap then fire the welder up at a high power and lay a new surface over it, by tweaking the power you can change the quality and appearance of the surface.

Always try and do your own thing.
Whatever you do try and avoid this kind of thing.

Awful generic factory made stuff, looks cool for about 5 minutes.

In my book recycling stuff is great as long as it is not too in your face, see the item above to see what I mean.
Sourcing this kind of stuff is hard work, my workshop is on a farm; farms are full of lovely metal things, but the grumpy farmers like them and wont let me have them. I do get to look in the scrap box and get some gems out of there. But chopping bits off other people's property is frowned upon. 'But I am an artist' apparently is not a good excuse.

Hope that helps.

Chunko'.