Making Sculpture from Scrap Metal

Peter Parkinson

• Publisher: Crowood
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781785000225
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Technical & Manufacturing Trades
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Transforming unlikely pieces of scrap metal into significant works of art - giving new life to things we throw away - is an accessible, creative and fulfilling activity. This book describes and illustrates the concerns and techniques involved in making this kind of sculpture, looking behind the work at the richness and diversity of an area of sculpture that deserves to be far better known. Topics covered include the role and purpose of sculpture, the particular qualities of sculpture made from scrap metal and the practical processes involved in its making. It also covers sources of scrap metal, identifying metals, reviewing metalworking techniques, creative approaches, different types of sculpture, and the making, finishing and installation of pieces of sculpture. This book will be of great interest to blacksmiths, sculptors and metalworkers and is beautifully illustrated with 108 colour photographs from work by professional sculptors and students, showcasing a range of different approaches.

CHAPTER ONE

SOURCING SCRAP METAL

A metal scrapyard, where it all ends up.

Metals have been recycled since before the Bronze Age, but this hasn’t prevented the fashionable renaming of what we used to call the ‘council tip’ as the ‘household waste recycling centre’. Most towns have one, and this is probably the nearest and most accessible source of scrap metal, but probably not the best.

The word ‘scrap’ suggests ‘rubbish’, which is misleading. Scrap metals have a value today, just as they did in the Bronze Age. Scrapyards make their money by dismantling items, sorting metals into particular categories, and selling bulk quantities to companies who melt them down to produce new metal ingot, sheet, plate or section. Today almost all new metals contain a significant proportion of recycled scrap, alongside virgin metal smelted from the ore. For example, new steel and aluminium typically incorporate around 40 per cent recycled material, and sometimes more.

The bulk of scrap metal passes through dedicated metal scrapyards, which are intrinsically dangerous places, full of spikes, sharp edges, heavy objects, oily, slippery surfaces and often unstable mounds of metal, ready to slide and catch a careless hand or foot. Scrapyards use cranes, metal-crushers, shears, oxy-acetylene cutting torches, heavy trucks and loading equipment, all of which are additional hazards. For this reason it is essential to wear ‘working clothes’, safety boots and work gloves when visiting a scrapyard. Equally important is asking permission to look round. The people running the yard are justifiably wary of visitors who might sustain cuts, a broken leg or worse.

There is always a yard office, so reporting there first is vital; simply walking in and wandering around is the quickest way to be ordered off the premises. Explaining what you are after, and why, is crucial. Remember that the essential function of the yard is to accumulate and sort metal, and to sell it by the truckload, so dealing with your more modest needs might be an annoying interruption to their working day. Be polite and patient. Wanting to buy a small amount of metal from a scrapyard is tantamount to walking into a farmyard and asking to buy a pint of milk.

Nevertheless explain your mission – show them pictures of previous work if you have them – gain their confidence, and you will meet people with a wealth of knowledge of metals and a remarkable ability to identify the material, origin and function of apparently nameless components. To get beyond the office, it may help to suggest that you have a particular item in mind – for example, a piece of 100mm square steel tube for a sculpture you are making. This sounds more positive and reassuring than simply asking if you can wander around with no particular objective.

Pricing is sometimes rather arbitrary, but is fundamentally based on weight. So a complex casting or an intricately machined gear wheel may cost no more than an offcut of steel plate or angle. Ferrous metals – steel and cast iron – are relatively cheap; aluminium, lead and stainless steels are more expensive, while metals such as copper, brass and bronze are considerably more expensive still. Depending on the scrapyard, anything that clearly still has a use, such as an undamaged firegrate, tool, or a decorative cast-iron grille, may attract a higher price.

Volundarhus: the title is the Icelandic word for ‘labyrinth’; a piece made entirely from tools, by Ian Campbell-Smith.

Types of Scrapyard

There are several kinds of outlet where scrap metals may be found, as itemized below. Most can be identified through the reference directory Yellow Pages.

Household waste recycling centres: These centres will have scrap metal of the domestic variety, typically including discarded bicycles, prams, pushchairs, pots, pans and cutlery, metal furniture, domestic appliances, and any number of items from the home and garden. These are often wedged together in one skip, which can make access difficult and the staff nervous if you attempt to drag something out. So choice may be limited, but if it is accessible, they are usually happy to sell you whatever might take your fancy.

The metals skip (dumpster), in a typical household waste recycling centre.

Vehicle scrapyards: Sometimes listed as ‘Car and Vehicle Dismantlers’, these yards specialize in stripping down old and damaged vehicles in order to salvage, store and sell usable parts. Damaged steel bodywork is often crushed into compact blocks to facilitate handling. Once parts have been dismantled and sorted, they become usable spare parts and are consequently more expensive. However, worn and damaged parts may be available fairly cheaply.

Architectural salvage or reclamation yards: Similarly, these yards store and sell salvaged building components in all kinds of materials, but including metal window frames, cast iron baths, guttering, lamp-posts, fireplaces, cisterns, grilles and perhaps the occasional decorative iron gate. Since these are often seen as ‘period’ features, they may fetch high prices. These yards are interesting to visit but seldom an economic source of scrap metal.

Junk shops: These shops are not antique shops and are rare these days, but still exist in some places, and may have small metal items such as old tools and cutlery, toys and ironmongery at reasonable prices.

Car boot sales: These sales are far from a prime source of scrap metal, but, like junk shops, may on occasion offer boxes of old tools, cutlery, ironmongery or metal fixings. However, unlike junk shops, sellers may be clearing a shed or garage and be willing to part with a job lot of metal items at a reasonable price, rather than taking it all home again. And bargaining is a car boot tradition.

Use your own scrap: forged scrap and trial pieces, rescued from the workshop scrap pile and composed inside a ring.

Metalworking companies: Located on industrial estates, these companies may, with the right approach, be happy to sell odd pieces from their waste skips, which would otherwise end up down the road at a large scrapyard. Metal fabrication businesses generate metal scrap in the form of sheet and plate offcuts, short ends of metal sections and blanked-out sheets; and engineering companies that machine metal, may throw away odd ends of bars and reject components.

Scrap metal yards: Often listed under ‘Scrap Metal Merchants’ or ‘Metal Recycling’, these yards are by far the most reliable and rewarding sources of scrap metal. Some yards handle all metals, while others specialize in either ferrous metals (cast iron and steels) or in non-ferrous metals such as lead, aluminium alloys, copper and copper alloys, brasses and bronzes. Confusingly, stainless steels, which are ferrous metals, are often handled by non-ferrous scrapyards.

The nature of the material in each yard depends on their sources. Most have regular contracts, to receive scrap metals from nearby industrial units. This may include the metal sheets from which profiles have been blanked, reject machined components or castings, vehicle brake drums and discs, lengths of metal surplus to requirements, offcuts of sheet, plate, structural angle and ‘I’ beam, old mechanical or electric assemblies such as pumps, motors and transformers, cookers, washing machines, and nameless mechanical components. The list is endless.

Since materials are coming into a yard and going out again on a regular basis, the stock changes all the time. In consequence, there is a significant element of chance that useful pieces will be available on the day you are there, so repeat visits are well worthwhile and can help establish a good working relationship with the yard.

Costs

Metal prices fluctuate daily with world commodity prices. However, as an indication of relative values, in June 2014 the prices a scrapyard would buy in metal by weight puts aluminium at four times the price of steel, stainless steels at six times the price, brass at fourteen times the price, and copper and its alloys at up to twenty times the price.

The prices you might be asked to pay are likely to be of the same relative order as these values. In June 2014 scrapyards were typically buying in steel scrap at £120 to £150 per tonne, or 12 to 15p per kilogram, but they would sell to you or me at a higher price. This still makes iron and steel quite clearly the best buy, the most abundant and available metal, and in many ways offering the most useful working properties.

Since metals are sold by weight, it is important to appreciate that the different densities of metals mean that a kilogram of steel is nearly one third the size – the volume – of a kilogram of aluminium, but is slightly larger than a kilogram of copper.

CHAPTER TWO

IDENTIFYING METALS

A life-size heron, by Harriet Mead. A large bird but easily alarmed, as you might guess from the look in its eye.

While iron and steel are most commonly used for making sculpture from scrap, the shape and appearance of a piece of metal is often the most crucial consideration, so components in other metals may offer advantages. In which case, being able to identify the metals from which they are made is important in understanding how they may be worked, joined and finished. There are four important indicators:

• the function and purpose of the metal object
• the appearance of the metal
• its relative weight
• whether or not it is magnetic

Pure, or almost pure metals are commercially available for special purposes. But it should be appreciated that most familiar metals are alloys – mixtures of metals and other elements. So what we casually identify as ‘steel’ or ‘aluminium’ is in fact part of a large family of alloys, each carefully formulated to provide particular manufacturing or service properties. Steels, for example, while defined as alloys of iron and carbon, may also contain a wide variety of alloy metals, including manganese, chromium, nickel, molybdenum and vanadium.

For our purposes, the precise metal alloy may be of little importance, but its broader identity affects the way that component may be worked. Wh...