https://ift.tt/2m1p6jx fabrication, before powder coating.The design.https://ift.tt/2zloVJi driveway project started the day I was leaving for 3 day trip to the beautiful sand dunes of eastern Lake Michigan. I received a call from a client in Florida who wanted me to personalize a driveway gate for his ranch.When I got home a few days later we agreed on a sketch and hashed out a half dozen revisions.Ordered material; some sticks of 2" square tubing of mixed 1/8" & 3/16" wall thickness, a couple of 72"x120" 5052 aluminum alloy sheets, picked it up a couple days later along with some other material for a different aluminum gate job. Brought everything back to the shop and built the frames over next couple of days. Mitered corners, double arched top frame rolled from 1/8" thick 2" square tubing.The artwork is cut on a 9' x 14' CNC plasma cutting table I built earlier this year. The art to metal process is something like this: Convert rasterized design sketches to Inkscape vectors, Inkscape vectors go to SheetCAM for conversion to gcode, save .tap file to USB, USB out to shop into my desktop LinuxCNC table controller, load aluminum sheets onto burn table, load gcode file in LinuxCNC and index, hit play: sheets are burned out with a Hypertherm Powermax 45XP set around 70 inches of cut per minute. Over next hour or so as the sheets are plasma cut, I monitor the table under a watchful eye as to prevent any major catastrophe and the waste of a $500 sheet of aluminum.The plasma cut sheets go from the CNC table onto the welding table where they're joined to the frames with 5356 aluminum alloy run through a Lincoln S100 spool gun run on a Lincoln 180 (the Home Depot variety) . Fit up. Tack weld in place with careful attention to keeping the sheet as flat as possible. Weld, polish, flip, weld, polish, off the table..on to round 2 with the 2nd panel. Rinse each panel with 3% zirconium oxide/distilled water mix for added adhesion & corrosion resistance. Off to the powder coat booth for two coats of super durable grade matte black powder coat.Time to build a crate to ship the panels to Florida!Let me know if you have any questions about the project, I'll be glad to answer them.Edit: fulfill request for link to project album. via /r/DIY https://ift.tt/2L1c14D
