Welded Coffee Table by Dillon

   About ten days ago, I was tossing a few ideas around in my head for what I could make as my final welding project for class. As I was browsing the results on Google, I ran into a few pieces of furniture made from scrap metal. There was everything from coat racks to benches and tables. For my project I decided to made a coat rack out of nuts and bolts in the shape of a hand. Tacking all the bits and pieces proved to be a pretty quick job. I needed something else to do. I was excited that my project was comlpete yet I found myself with a void that only fusion welding could fill.

   Needing to come up with a Christmas present  for my older brother and deisel mechanic, I decided to make a coffee table out of an old International Scout tailgate. If I could find one. Finding the tailgate was as cumbersome and time consuming as actually welding the whole peice, if not more. After visiting three junkyards in our beautiful valley, I stumbled upon the perfect tailgate for my borther's Christmas present. Slightly rusted, originally green but now looking as though it belonged to the Earth itself, that tailgate had aged like bourbon in a barrel. I managed to make good enough purchase on the rusted bolts with a 13mm box wrench to release the tailgate from its original owner.

   When I got the tailgate home, I realized that I knew what part of the table the tailgate was going to be but that I had not figured out what was going to serve as legs for this rustic and repurposed piece. After a bit of trial and error, I resorted to visiting the hardware store to see what they had that I thought might work. I wound up leaving with seventeen feet of heavy, thick-gage chain. After about four hours of welding, this was the final product: