ACETYLENE TORCH PHOTOGRAPHY - Part 1

papa-pepper(81)

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These days, it is always something.

As you may have seen in my Randomness of Homesteading posts, often times @papa-pepper ends up doing something completely different than he started out doing. When it's being an emergency veterinarian, a carpenter, or a mechanic, you've got to deal with whatever life throws your way. A lot of this you may have to do all by yourself, but, sometimes you're blessed enough to have friends to help!

TODAY'S PROBLEM & SOLUTION

While removing some trees to prepare a place for our septic system, I accidentally ended up snapping the U-bolts on my friend's backhoe attachment for his front end loader. This basically unmounted the backhoe attachment rendering it nonfunctional.

Thankfully, it was not really as big of a problem as I had originally thought, and it gave me an opportunity to learn a little more as well. For some reason, I really like situations like this.

The whole setting is so raw and industrial. There's heavy metal, rust, sparks, fire, dirty hands, and even molten metal at times. While I had previously heard of something called an acetylene torch, I didn't really know what it was and I had certainly never used one. To replace the broken U-bolts, we decided to use some tough bolts with a metal plate to hold them in place.

While I was observing the process, I took the opportunity to take some photographs. They are very interesting, because in one way, they are all basically the same. They all have the same subject matter and were all taken within a few minutes of one another. However, it is not exactly a case of "if you've seen one, you've seen them all."

Each second the image is very different from the previous one. The metal may be a different temperature, the torch may be in a different position, and the sparks are always shooting off in other directions. It is a rapidly changing environment despite the similarities, and each photo is unique and completely original.

Although I chose my favorites, I wound up with quite a few. Therefore, I'll be doing a second #photo post featuring some of the other shots. For now, I'll share these with you, and in the next post I'll cover more about my first time actually cutting with an acetylene torch. Thankfully, everything went well, the metal plates we made worked perfectly, and the backhoe attachment is now fully functional again!