Those signs have been up in every HF I have been to since 2017 - including two in North Carolina, 2,000+ miles from here.
JazzVinyl wrote:I know some folks who weld but none say they "fabricate".
Show them the light.
When my twins were born, I realized it was time to address the elephant in the room, so to speak, in regards to child safety and containment in our house. We needed a baby gate across an 11 foot span, with offset end points, and we didn't consider it viable to go to with a custom order that would be $800+ and only get used for a couple years.
It was cheaper to buy a welder and some steel, and have at 'er.
At that point, the grand total of my experience welding was doing an incredibly bad job of "puking" two sticks of 7018 onto some bundled steel fence posts with an ancient stick welder, because the family members goading me to "try it" also refused to offer any instruction.
I built the gate and learned a lot.
Then I started fabricating small jigs for other things.
As the baby gate was approaching the end of its useful life, I looked at it in just the right way one day, and remembered that its height was 1" wider than a crib mattress ... and we were about to need another toddler bed.
When the gate came down, I chopped it in a few strategic places, added a couple pieces of steel left over from the initial build, fabricated some feet for felt pads to protect the hardwood floors, and we had a bed frame.
More fabrication started happening for my hobbies and the Nova: Throttle linkage. Cruise control cable brackets. Jigs and fixtures for gunsmithing. Tools for bullet swaging and lead wire cutting. And more.
After the bed frame was replaced by a twin bed, I turned it into a coat rack and some shelves.
Last summer, I built a new front porch roof. The load bearing structure is all steel. Without the welder, it would have cost me thousands of dollars to have built. But with a welder and minor experience fabricating - even just the simple stuff that I've done - I was done for under $800, and had hidden touches like hidden captured nuts for plant hooks. (But not counting the roofing materials. I was working parallel to a roofer re-roofing the entire house, including the sheeting, so I don't include those costs.)
(As part of the immortal baby gate's legacy, I included a piece of it in the porch roof structure. I also plan to put some in the TD frame. That gate lives on in so many ways...)
The only way to fail at fabrication is to never try.