And more scrubbing before priming and painting.

And all done. Total cost: $0.

Here's the follow-on in March. I left all my MIG-welding goodies back here because I didn't have room in the Jeep to take them back to New Mexico. In the meantime, mom got inspired to find other things for me to weld. This is some fireplace grate that didn't fit in the fireplace, but she decided it would look nice as part of the corral gate. These are the welding contact points ground down on the back side.

From home I wasn't sure whether the MIG welder would reach the corral because the nearest 240-volt, 20-amp outlet is in the laundry room. But I have a 50-foot welding extension cord, plus the six feet of the welder cord itself, plus another five feet from my power adapter (reconfigured to dryer mode here). The cart looks like some kind of miniature derby racer. But this picture is really about (1) the grate, and (2) the cable, which was basking in the sun to soften up so I could coil it nicely for a change. March in Phoenix is nearing the end of the tolerable outside work time; in a month or so, you wouldn't need the welder to melt metal...

Dragging this unit around, at around 100 pounds, is a back-breaker. Luckily mom has this nifty garden cart. Since this is outdoors, I'm using flux-cored welding wire instead of the argon/carbon-dioxide shielding gas. That's about 40 pounds lighter without the cylinder and its rigging.

As a fallback, in case the electric welder didn't reach, I had brought my oxy-acetylene rig. It wasn't needed, but that didn't stop me from finding some excuse to use it. (This picture is staged for the flame, by the way; the cylinders should be chained to something besides themselves.).

This is the whole family: C25 (25% carbon dioxide, 75% argon) for steel; pure argon for aluminum; and acetylene and oxygen for everything imaginable.

In particular, I couldn't resist wantonly flame-cutting a broken screwdriver right down the center. I didn't even try to make this come of straight, but I'm quite happy with the precision of the cutting torch. The combination of electric and gas welding rigs can't be beaten for engineering fabrication work. It's not as useful for debugging programs, but a lot of code I've encountered (written?) would have benefited from a good flame-broiling...

And then later something else was added. This is a drainage system for the water buckets.

The welding element is for the reinforcements to hold the buckets upright. Scrap rebar worked great, but first the fence sections had to be squeezed together.

Just when you thought it was over, then there's this. As a Christmas present, I decided to make some llama plaque things for the corral. These were some options.

Plasma cutting the 14-gauge cold-rolled steel sheet.