Following on from my recent Hammersmith road panel adventure and blog postings -
- I took three of the panels into college to cut them up into more manageable sizes and weights.
Thanks to my sons, Fraser, Will and Jack for their help to get the massively heavy panels into and out of the van.
On further inspection in the metal workshop, we decided that the rubber backing on each of the panels needed to come off first.
The first two panels were relatively easy to seperate.
Very excited that the rubber came off in one piece and was an exact copy of the rusted and painted steel panel. The third panel was a bit more difficult and took me two hours of hammering and pulling to separate - but it was worth it.
Now for the next step - cutting the panels using the workshop's mega plasma cutter.
Plasma cutting is a process that is used to cut steel and other metals of different thicknesses (or sometimes other materials) using a plasma torch. In this process, an inert gas (in this unit, compressed air) is blown at high speed out of a nozzle; at the same time an electrical arc is formed through that gas from the nozzle to the surface being cut, turning some of that gas to plasma. The plasma is sufficiently hot to melt the metal being cut and moves sufficiently fast to blow molten metal away from the cut.
The head of the workshop, Falcon kindly helped me with the cutting - well he cut and I lugged the panels around.
Got a chance to wear a welding helmet - couldn't get photos of the cutting as the light would have damaged the lens.
Finished a full-on day with twelve smaller panels - next step is to make some art with them.
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