Stainless Steel Rose from Scrap Metal

Step 2 Making the Basic Parts

It doesn't matter how you shape the metal as long as you can form the basic shapes needed to construct the parts of the rose. I had a full shop at my disposal, so I made my pieces using a hydraulic press to make straight cuts and I used a stationary belt sander to obtain the rounded shapes. However, these tools are not necessary. If you know any body that has a laser engraver/cutter (wink, wink), or a water jet you could draw up the pieces on AutoCAD and get them cut for you. Or if you have a bench grinder and a chop saw with an abrasion blade, you are totally capable of making these simple shapes. If you use a lighter gauge metal, such as 22ga, then sheet metal sheers will be adequate to cut the shapes out of the steel.

Petals:
The petal is the main and most notable part of the rose. They are made using a simple ice cream cone shape. You need to make them in increasing sizes because they need to get larger and larger as you go from the center of the rose outward. The number required completely depends on how detailed and how tightly packed you would like to make the rose. I used about thirty petals in my sculpture and made them very tightly packed.

Leaves:
The leaves of the rose are made with a shape that is similar to an ellipse, but with pointier tips along the large axis. The number of leaves required depends on your taste. You can even leave them out of the sculpture if desired

Thorns:
The thorns can easily be made out of left over scraps from making the other rose parts. Any triangular piece scrap metal that is between 1/2" to 1" in length along the hypotenuse will work fine. Once again the number of thorns is completely up to you.

Stem:
The stem can be made out of any piece of stainless steel that is about 1/4" in diameter. You could use round or square bar stock. Round would be ideal, but square might give the rose a cool look. Square bar stock can easily be sanded or ground to a round profile if need be. I did not have either of the aforementioned materials, so I constructed my stem by TIG welding together 4 pieces of 1/8" welding filler rod. I do not recommend doing this because it is time consuming and requires welding experience to do correctly, however if you have the filler metal, experience, and time at your disposal...knock yourself out! It took me at least 8 hours of shop time to accomplish, but I had the time to burn. One cool result was that it gave my stem a very natural look because of the distortion that resulted from welding the filler rods together.

Comments

[es30381]

hey mate, excellent instructable..... really informative. can i please just ask the approximate sizes of your largest and smallest petals and leaves and petals and stuff. thanks mate, it's a huge help. ES

[jaredzeuli]

I know its hard to read because Instructables resized the image, but in the second step the AutoCAD drawing has the sizes. The petals range from about 1/2" to 3" in length. The leaves are about 2" in length. And the thorns are about 5/8" in length.

[es30381]

thanks mate, huge help.