Technically speaking, the kind of cut and welded metal art that I make is referred to as Direct Metal Sculpture. This type of metalworking is in contrast to brass or bronze sculptures which are typically created using an indirect method such as the lost wax casting method.

The pieces that I create involve cutting, hammering, welding, shaping, and otherwise directly acting upon the metal to manipulate it into its final shape. In other words, there is no pouring of molten materials.

Some people have asked me about the actual process so I’ve taken the liberty of documenting the creation of a couple of pieces.
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As many of you are aware, I am a Direct Metal Sculptor specializing in welded metal art. I have several older pieces on my other blog at JohnsArt.org, but it’s been over a year since I posted anything new there. So, instead of posting everything I do I figured I’ll just selectively share a few things with you guys here on OMB.

Several months ago I was asked to come up with some large freestanding star sculptures which could be used as a collaborative project for the school aged kids in my home town of Frisco, TX. The design requirements were:

• There was virtually no budget.
• The sculptures needed to be weatherproof.
• They needed to be portable.

Generally speaking these three things don’t really go together, but after quite a bit of brainstorming I designed and fabricated all of the star sculptures that follow.
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This site has been getting a lot of visitors from the search engines due to my previous posts about the PlasmaCAM CNC Plasma Cutting Machine.

These visits have translated into quiet a few questions coming in via my contact form. Several people considering the purchase of a PlasmaCAM have received the DVD from them and have been asking me how much of it is true. After all, Stan makes it sound so easy to start creating anything you can imagine from metal with this machine.

As a result, I’m going to walk you through the video step-by-step and provide analysis to help separate fiction from fact.
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Over the past two days, I completed the setup of my new CNC Plasma cutting machine (also see PlasmaCAM Part 1), and man is it awesome!

After physically constructing the cutting table, I needed to do a little wiring in my Hypertherm PowerMax 1000 plasma torch so that it would interface with the control box of the PlasmaCAM in order to allow the machine to turn the torch on and off. The instruction video had me really worried because it kept talking about needing to have a professional electrician install the wiring and then perform a huge batch of tests in order to ensure everything was OK.
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Today a dream came true. For about two years now I’ve been planning, comparing, procrastinating… but today my new CNC Plasma Cutting machine arrived.

After comparing a wide variety of machines including DynaCNC, PlasmaCAM, Practical CNC, TorchMate, Dynatorch, and MultiCam, I settled on the PlasmaCAM for the following reasons:
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