Cutthroat Door Handles

[nuge]

One of the funner jobs in a while.

11ga., embellished and inflated.

[Greg Obach]

Dude ! that is absolutely cool

nice work

[Bruce Macmillan]

Beautiful, Real eye candy......Now for a tutorial on how to inflate those puppies! I try to picture you ''inflating'' them and in my mind's eye I can only come up with a vauge image of you puffing up a red hot fish...That ain't right

[Larry L]

Very nice man... I have seen a handful of inflated vessels but yours are cleaner than any of the examples Ive had experience with... Have you done quite a few?

[Tom Allyn]

Fantastic!

Yes, please explain the inflating process.

[JNewman]

Really nice. I have to agree with Larry, that is a really nice clean job on the joint. Good choice in going with heavy stock.

[Lynn Gledhill]

Beautiful Nuge! I wouldn't know how to begin... Really nice work.

[D_Evans]

Now for the how-to....

[nuge]

This was my first try at playing with the technique so I'm no expert. It worked great for the fish form, at the wide areas you get more poof, at the narrow spots not so much, just like a fish.

Here are a few more photo's. The process is pretty straightforward and actually kinda low tech. Get some sheet metal, weld the edges together, weld in a pipe, get it hot and shoot some air in there. My compressor is rickety but I think I was at about 100-120 psi and the nozzle was a cheap spray type with some rubber wrapped around the tip. Of course the welds have to be good, i had a few leaks that were easily patched. I tigged them but this would be a perfect spot to bone up on your oxy/acetylene skills. Low tech. Toss it in the forge, get it orange and poof it up! The thicker gauge metal allows you to play with the surface, thinner stuff will be more dramatic. Tons of ways to go...and fun.

I added a photo of the tail texture tooling. I don't have enough oomph in my press to get the detail I wanted in one shot in the 11 gauge material so I made a 1" square set tool, added some fences to the die and squished it a bit a a time.

Thanks for looking!

[nuge]

In the last pic you can see where I started to go wrong! I welded in the dorsal fin on that guy backwards. Could have fixed it but I get a kick out of a little bit of error.