Welding Tips and Tricks

Here's what happens when you have a bucket full of scrap steel, a few too many beers and you regret selling your torch and being unable to heat things anymore, you make this thing. The main rule I had for this thing is that it had to be utterly free, I could not spend a single cent on it minus charcoal and neither could I cut up any of my few remaining steel plate stock I have for real projects, at least not until I saw if it'd even function like I thought I would, so here it is, It's about 5.5" deep, 11" long and just over 5.5" wide. I haven't tried it with coal yet but using charcoal it'll actually melt steel if I leave it in too long. The base is a old 50lb rod can with a 1/8" plate cut to fit and tacked onto the top then drilled to fit a 2" pipe along with a second hole down at the bottom where an inflatable motor blows into the base and provides more than enough air. The rod can functions both as an ash trap and a way to smooth out the airflow a little bit.
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looks good....put a grate on it, some burgers and dogs.....good to go!

I had a bunch of little cut ends from building wood shed, I found if I split them into halves if I played with the blower just right I could get steel red hot with wood too, without the blower, it actually would probably make a pretty good grill