DIY - Weld a Fire Pit
We've made a fire pit video before, but David gets a little bit more technical in this version. Watch how he turns an old dewar into a stylish new fire pit!
Learn about the Hypertherm Powermax 85 plasma cutter and some of our favorite finishing tools at https://store.generalair.com/
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Hi I'm David with General Air. One of the most fun things about fabrication is looking at something and closing your eyes and imagining what it could be. Today we're gonna cut this dower up and make it into a fire pit. This is a Hypertherm Powermax 85, an 85 amp plasma cutter. It's gonna make our job of turning this dower into a fire pit quite a lot easier. The first cut is going to be right underneath this factory well and the reason why is because I can press my plasma cutter right up against that weld and use it as a guide to get a straight cut all the way around this vessel.
Alright we have our top cut done and that's going to be the lid of the fire pit. Now I've got to take a little bit of height off this dower, so I'm going to measure 24 inches up and make a cut around the middle in order to get a cool pattern on our fire pit base. I had a friend print out a large piece of paper with a hexagon pattern. You may be wondering what I have my base mounted to; this is a panduras positioner. Now I know a lot of people won't have this positione,r but this is one of the best tools that you can use if you're working on something that's round. For the lid, cut in the belly cut. I used the standard consumables that came with our Duramax torch, but now when I'm going to cut out my hexagons, I'm going to switch to fine cut consumables. All I have to change is my nozzle and my retainer ring and that's going to give me a better clear view of the arc. Okay I went ahead and turned my machine down a little in the amperage went down to 55 amps. This is gonna give me a nice fine cut on this eighth inch material, also I'm not gonna start on the line, I'm just gonna start right below it pierce through the vessel and then go right up to the line and see how straight I can draw drive.
Alright we have our shapes cut out now. Now one of the problems with cutting with a plasma cutter on stainless steel is you get carbide precipitation on the edges. All that really means is the carbon that was in the base material has ejected out. This leaves for a really really hard edge. So I've got a couple of options to clean up these shapes and one is a 36 grit zirconated sanding disc and the other is a double cut carbide burr made by a company called Ferd. I'm going to use both of these to clean up our shapes. The lid for our fire pit is going to be the top of the doer, now there's a couple of things that I'm going to cut off these guys on the side here. I'm going to cut those off, but then I'm going to make them into tabs on the sides so the lid stays even on the base. Now we're going to get started fabricating onto the lid. Now besides we got those cut off we still got a blend grind on there that's all well and good. Now I did go ahead and build this handle out of three quarter inch stainless steel; made some cuts here and TIG welded this back together and then blended it into a nice finish. Now one thing I don't want to do is weld this directly to the lid because the heat of the fire, of course, would transform the lid to the handle and you wouldn't be able to pick it up. So in order to help that I'm going to add these little tabs and what these tabs will do is they'll hold our handle on but they'll also insulate the heat from the lid to the handle on the outer perimeter of our lid. We're going to put these tabs here and what they're going to do is they're going to help center the lid onto the base.
Alright, here is the finished product in action, one of the coolest things about this fire pit is that after it ran for about an hour with a really hot fire in it, it started to change colors. Now it's a little bit more of like a rosy gold color and I suspect just knowing what happens when you heat up stainless steel, that the more fires that I do in it the more colors are going to come out. It just shows you how you can make trash into treasure.