Welding

My Owl

Anika's Flower

My Flower

Anika's Fish

Anika welding with Grandpa

Me welding with Grandpa

My grandparents live on a farm, which is pretty cool. Throughout my life I have looked forward to going to the farm, because I have been able to do some pretty cool things there that I can’t do at home. A while ago, my Grandpa started to weld some really cool sculptures using old farm parts. Welding is when you join together two metal pieces by heating them to the point of melting. My sister Anika and I went to the farm for a few days last summer without my parents. My parents and grandparents really thought that Anika and I should try welding. While we were at the farm for those few days we decided we would learn how to weld. The first thing we had to do was get some really “cute” welding clothes. We each had a pair of my cousin’s old sweatpants and one of my grandma’s old shirts. We had to wear special helmets and gloves while welding because the sparks could damage your eyes if you looked at them for too long. The sparks could also burn you. Anika managed to burn a hole in her shoes which I think is pretty funny.  The first day we decided to start with an easy little flower. We got to look through a huge pile of metal farm parts to find the things we wanted to make our flower. We each chose some gears for the flower, a stick for the stem and some pieces of a chain for the leaves on the stem. My sister went first and I was excited to give it a try as well. Welding is unlike anything I have ever done before. It was actually pretty easy and not as scary as I thought it was going to be. I think it's so cool how you can just melt together two pieces of metal. The next day we decided that we wanted to try again and make something a little more advanced. Anika made a fish sculpture. She had to use this crazy blow torch thing that cut through a steel plate. I made an owl. My grandpa came up with the idea. We used some horse shoes, some washers, this kind of metal lattice, and some random other metal sticks. I think that it is really cool that I know how to weld. I like seeing the people building at my school welding all of the steel columns together because I know how to do what they are doing.

-Haley