OnlineMetals.com - Made With Metals Ep. 2 | Welding a Woven Brass Motorcycle Rack

It's an addiction but it's a good addiction [Music] there's something about being on two wheels you feel like you can go anywhere or do anything my name is Carl Bjorklund and I'm with Super Rat Carl Bjorklund is a friend of mine mostly we just come over here to Carl's shop and just hang out sometimes we just sit around and talk for an hour just bouncing ideas off each other what do you want to do to the bike Carl this is my own bike so i was kind of wanting to build a little rack here you know i thought it'd be cool to do a project with Carl because he's always making something and always down to make something if you're a fabricator or a creator maker there's always more to learn [Music] well the plan was just to make a rack i guess well i think this one looked good here we had a couple bullet points we wanted to do some kind of thing that looked like a weave on top we wanted to do wraps he knew we wanted to be roughly i don't know 12 inches long by roughly 9 inches wide you know you can only make it so small before the corners all start running into each other plus you don't want a really big bike with a really small rack in this case here we use brass and silicon bronze the brass you know looks really cool and it's a nice contrast to the bronze but it's not readily weldable but the silicone bronze welds pretty buttery [Music] it's so hard to make shapes out of metal that's kind of why I'm drawn to metal I like to punish myself [Music] we in advance had made a die for actually crimping that weave aspect into it just a little sharpie center line on there which we lined up with the center lines of each individual press Carl just worked them through there and worked pretty slick now we have all four of these pieces which are going to turn into corners we got them drilled with a 3/16 hole so we can put these plugs in them and the reason for that is when we weld this thing together you can see how perfect the alignment ends up being [Music] so we've got 5/8's here and 5/8 they pretty much need to be 4 and 5/8's inches and they're about a half inch long [Music] you can see how perfect all the alignment is you know the 90 degree bronze pieces that was so cool when they came together and that seam just disappeared alright let's see if this works pressing all those we kind of just used sharpie lines and so I was a little bit wondering well are these things going to just drop in very nice when you have a close tolerance of pieces that are all in a row you can tell when one gets off but they look great [Music] one of the things that we thought was a good idea was to basically bisect the support bars such that we could sort of tightly wrap it around the support hoop up top there we ripped the length of it on the bandsaw and then sort of cleaned it up at the sander [Music] manually formed it over a piece of the material [Music] one of the last steps is we run a 5/8 mill end down through it to perfectly shave the inside so when we finally wrapped it over the bar it just had a precise fit to it [Music] neither of us are professionals at heating and bending metal around objects I was really happy that those all came out nice I guess if you buff one thing you kind of have to buff everything if you know screws and hardware you're going to look at it and be like oh whoa they buff the screws too that's cool I don't care who you are nice rack I think it's pretty cool overall this thing looks like a polished wedding ring pretty much got exactly what we set out to do and we wanted to do the woven stuff we wanted to mix bronze and brass and then we wanted to do wraps it turned out better than I expected he's got really low standards too so that's it's great something we built that actually works that's a win [Music]