Metal Art Projects
One of our favorite stops when we take family trips to Door County, WI is Hand On Art Studio near Fish Creek. It’s a great place to have fun with all forms of art. All of the metal projects shown below were made at Hands-On.
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Planning for the Crane: For my first major metal piece, I planned ahead and created a full-scale pattern in illustrator. The design isn’t original, we have a fire pit with the same crane pattern. I adapted it for some yard art.
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Working with a plasma cutter. The pieces were cut from pieces of steel. I don’t remember the gauge, but it was around 1/16th of an inch I think. Getting smooth lines with the cutter takes a ton of practice. I never really mastered it.
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First experience with welding. It’s WAY harder than you would think to get it right. Requires lots of practice.
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Grinding away. Since using the plasma cutter was a little harder to control than I expected, I spent a lot of time with the handheld grinder smoothing things out.
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Polished and ready to go.
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Butterfly. After the massive effort of the crane, I wanted to try something a little more simple. This was way easier by comparison, but getting the interior plasma cuts smoothed out was very tricky.
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Butterfly after a couple of years outside.
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Great Blue Heron. We had another trip planned to Door County, so I wanted to try another metalworking project. I came up with the idea of making a Great Blue Heron. I found a random picture on the Web, converted it to line art, and develop full-scale patterns.
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Like usual, working the plasma cutter is tricky and this time resulted in lots of jagged edges. I was also use a much thicker gauge steel this time.
![](https://wiscmapper.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/art-5-1024x1024.jpg)
… some that means more time on the grinder to clean things up.
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Heron after a year outside.
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