Tractor Grate

My first tractor was lent to me by my Father in Law, Ed Schwerin. It was a Romanian made forty five horse power Long. Super easy to work on--which was good because it took a lot of work to keep it spinning like a top. It was missing its front grate, so I made one at Summer Shop. Back then John Amero taught me to weld with a torch.

To my astonishment, the grate survived. My son Arlo dug it out of a dirt pile, and brought it home to use as a decoration for his Little Pond Gardens project. I found it leaning up against a pole at Summer Shop, liberated some of its "tractor grate" nature with an angle grinder, buffed it out and painted it up with some spent acrylic paints that my daughter Kaitlin left lying around.

Now it hangs in the living room of my new pad. It's a broken circular saw blade with a bunch of rectangles welded to it. That part was hot dipped galvanized. Back when I was wrestling with my galvanization problem. Back when I drove truckloads of metal art to the galvanization facility to see my pieces lowered into a vat of molten zinc.

The good news about galvanizing is that it doesn't rust. The bad news is that if you want to weld it, you need to drink a bunch of milk first so that you don't throw up from the fumes.

This Tractor Gate is a painted galvanized "sunburst" welded to a rusty carbon steel "skeleton." A skeleton is a piece of scrap metal that has had the same shape cut from it over and over again.

When Arlo spotted it hanging in the Bunkey, where I now live, he was bummed. He intended to use it somehow. Too late. I snagged it, modified it, and hung it on the wall.

Arlo knows the rules in our family: you snooze you lose...