The Creation of “Lewis’ Iron Man”

As you know, if you’ve followed my blog, my husband and I have a lot of fun creating critters from iron in our shop.

We got some scrap iron from a wonderful man who lowered a counter between our kitchen and dining area for us recently. He brought the scrap iron in payment for some welding he needed done. We were delighted because scrap iron yards and salvage yards no longer allow people to wander around looking for wonderful scraps. They have to worry about liability issues now, and can’t afford to let anybody except employees in their yards anymore. :0(

A few days ago, after finishing some more metal cats (pictures in another blog post to follow) we started looking more carefully at the goodies we had on a trailer outside the shop. We decided to build a ‘robot’ or “Iron Man” who will ‘live’ toward the bottom of our 650 foot STEEP driveway and will be doffing his hat and holding a “WELCOME!” sign that visitors will see as they start to drive up to our home.

He’s going to weigh a LOT. We needed a chain hoist to hold up his torso, and we’re adding legs, feet, arms, and a head to that. We’ll have to hire a wrecker – after we get him out of the shop somehow – to take him down the driveway and put him in place on a concrete pad we’ll have to build ourselves with sac-crete.

We have both legs on now, and most of one arm. I have to sand blast each piece that’s small enough, like the face, eyes, shovels we’re using for hands, etc. to get as much of the rust and glonk off the pieces as possible so that they can be welded, then painted with a rust-preventive primer.

We’ll try to attach the shovel hand to the arm that’s attached, and then start working on the other arm tomorrow….