I was drinking a Coke the other day, and began to think about it's color. It was brown. When I pee, it comes out clearish yellow. Where does the color go? Are my guts brown now because I drank too many soft drinks? What about Koolaid and stuff like that? I guess my insides look like a rainbow by now.

Ok, so, to continue my series on the Brutus 10 clone build, the next phase was to get the structure started. Initially I was going to make the next phase polishing up the kegs to make them all shiny and awesome looking. I did start that aspect of the project, but moved on to the structure build because it is more exciting. Since the structure is made of steel, I needed to procure a few new things. First and foremost was a welder.

There are many different types of welders on the market, and they can be quite expensive. My goal was to find a welder that was relatively inexpensive, but one that would still do the job. Without going into too much detail on the various types of welders, I settled on a flux-core welder, because the device was low cost, and I didn't have to mess with separate welding gas tanks, and it would still do what I required. I went with the Campbell Hausfeld flux-core wire feed welder. The welder was 129 bucks, 92 of which was free money I received for doing surveys online for money.



Next I needed a stack of steel to build with. After a quick search around the interwebs, I located speedymetals.com, and settled on 1.5" square tubing with a 1/16" wall thickness. Is this overkill? Probably. Will it look cool though? Absolutely. This steel was $155 shipped. I bought more than I needed because I was almost certain I would screw up a few times, and didn't want to run out. I bought ten 6 foot long pieces.

If you remember from some of my other projects, I purchased a pretty nice Ryobi compound mitre, so to cut all this steel, I simply had to purchase a steel cutting blade for a few bucks.

So after chopping up the steel, I had to weld this crap together. I have welded in the past. I took a metal fabrication class in high school, and then during my college days, I took a few classes in the metal shop. So I am no stranger to welding, but I have not done it in well over 15 years. So I headed to Home Depot and picked up some sheet metal to lay some test beads.

I did more test beads than depicted here by the way, this was just when I chose to take a picture. Next, I moved on to the real welding. First step was to layout the steel, and tack weld it in place. Then finally, weld it all up, and grind it down to make it look nice.

I am trying to blow through all this pretty quick, to keep the articles short, because a picture is worth 1000 words, but there is a lot of information and thought processes I am leaving out. For example, I decided to go with 45 degree angles on the steel, so that the top of the structure would be completely sealed, and have the added structural bonus of sitting on top of the legs rather than stressing my welds by having it all done at 90 degree angles. 3 full kegs of water and grains can be pretty heavy, I'd rather not have it fall on my face.

Also, I am leaving out all the little tidbits I learned along the way, such as, it is probably a good idea to remove the sawdust collection bag from the mitre saw when cutting through steel, because the sparks fly like a mother fucker all over the place. Speaking of sparks, probably should make sure they don't fly out the sides of your steel into a gas can 8-). Also, ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS wear your safety goggles and a good pair of work gloves.

Anyway, I have lot of more information like that so maybe I will do a few posts from time to time during the process just dedicated to helpful tidbits, or maybe do one dedicated post filled with all that kinda crap when the project is done.

That is enough for now. If I gloss over something important, please let me know and I will try and cover it in a reply, or with a future post.