PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGEA46 June 2019 _ PopularMechanics.com
A. I was surprised
when Wicks told me
the welding mask
cost a few hundred
dollars, because it
felt almost flimsy. But
what you’re paying for
is how fast it detects
the arc and darkens—
the faster, the better
for your eyes.
B. The bender’s jack
was just like the one
in my Jeep, but with
one notable differ-
ence: It had a much
better handle, which
Wicks added himself.
C. The completed
rack.
D. Every surface and
edge of an anvil has a
purpose. In the center
is a “hardy hole” that
accepts additional
tools, like a blade that
cuts heated steel you
hammer against it.IN THE METAL SHOP, EVERY SINGLE PART OF
A BUILD IS UP TO YOU. THAT’S SCARY, BUT ALSO
THE ULTIMATE ARTISAN EXPERIENCE.
A FEW YEARS EARLIER, I’d used the Jeep to take three friends on a
camping trip to Maine’s Acadia National Park. It was barely possible
to fit four adult humans and camping gear in a Wrangler. That wasn’t
the first time I’d run up against the Jeep’s limited carrying capac-
ity, but it was the point at which I decided something had to be done.
I live in New York City. Having a car here is a hassle—the street
parking, the dings, the traffic—but it provides a very important func-
tion: escape. Occasionally, you need to be able to gather up friends and
go somewhere. Anywhere. With space and trees and stars and beers
that cost less than $8. My Jeep had to be able to perform that task for
me, no matter how much equipment and luggage we brought along.
I looked into buying a roof rack. Often you buy two parts: a frame
that mounts to the body of the Jeep, and a basket that mounts to the
frame. (That second part is unnecessary if you’re more interested in
carrying things like skis or kayaks, but for the multipurpose use I had
in mind, it was a requirement.) The problem was that my particular
Jeep—long wheelbase, two doors—was made for only three years.
Options were few and expensive.
So I called Wicks. He suggested buying the frame, if I could find
one cheap, because the level of precision required to perfectly mate
a custom frame to the Wrangler’s body mounting points was prob-
ably (okay, definitely) beyond what I could produce. But what we
could do, he said, was build a basket, provided we found a design
that compromised my functional demands and my skill level.
I wanted something that would use as much of the rooftop space
as possible, had reasonably tall sides for securing cargo, and could
be easily removed if I wanted to take the convertible top off the Jeep.
That gave us a 54-inch by 70-inch rack of steel tubing, rectangular
with rounded corners, the top railing held up by four-inch-tall bal-
usters. The floor of the rack would be made of flat stock, which would
be easier to load cargo on than round tubing.
The project would take me on a tour of the metal shop—cutting,
bending, welding, and even forging. That scared me a lit tle. Steel had
always struck me as brutish and unfriendly compared to wood, which
I was far more familiar with. But then, that’s why I wanted to do it.
By the time I got to Maine to start the build, Wicks had drawn a
full-size diagram on a sheet of hardboard on the shop’s worktable.
The first thing to do was cut the tubing and flat stock down to size.
Cutting was the only technique Wicks would teach me that I was
already familiar with from my experience in a woodshop. I measured,
marked, and cut the way I’d have done with lumber on a miter saw.
As I cut pieces to length, I laid them out on the hardboard project
plan. One by one, I filled in Wicks’s drawing—top rail, bottom rail,
crosspieces. Everything fit inside its lines except the corners. Those
still had to be bent.
Each corner piece needed a smooth 90-degree curve. That
seemed simple enough. Then I learned that tubing bent too far or too
forcefully can collapse. Wicks taught me to avoid this problem with
a blacksmithing principle: Blacksmiths don’t curve, say, a piece of
wrought iron by hammering in one place over and over. They scatter
blows against the entire surface, slowly producing the shape they
need. That was too advanced for me, so we did the equivalent with a
simple hydraulic bender. (See opposite.)
Even so, I still managed to bend one piece significantly past 90
degrees. “Is there any way to salvage this?” I asked.
Wicks held it up to gauge how badly
I’d overshot the angle. “Yeah, I think
so,” he said.
“What do we do?” I asked.
“Hit it against something hard,” he
said, slipping it into a vise. He grabbed
one of his blacksmithing hammers
and banged it back to 90.
That never would’ve worked on wood.
The next day, after igniting his forge,
Wicks told me he thought we could
make our own wing nuts. “I’ve got these
small pieces of steel bar,” he said. “We’re
going to flatten them on alternate sides
to create the wings.” The wing nuts
would secure the brackets that would
hold the basket to the frame—brack-
ets we’d also cut ourselves. He pulled a
Wite-out pen out of his pocket and drew
lines on the bar to mark each wing and
the center nut. “Wite-out doesn’t burn
off in the forge,” he said, “and you can
still see it when the metal’s glowing.”
I would say the hardest part of
blacksmithing is developing the coor-
dination to move everything with a set of tongs, but there are a lot of
hardest parts to blacksmithing. I could barely land an accurate blow
w ith the hammer when my arms were fresh. They were hopeless after
a few swings. Getting a sense of the different angles on the anvil and
how to use them to my advantage was surprisingly nuanced. So was
remembering that metal is hot. More than once I tried to pick mol-
ten steel up off the ground with my bare hands.
But then: I made my own wing nuts. Working in a woodshop, you
never think you’ll build your own nails or screws. In the metal shop,
ever y single par t of a build is up to you. That’s scar y,
just as I’d imagined, but also the ultimate artisan
experience.IN THE DARKNESS OF THE WELDING MASK, every-
thing was black except the flickering light from the
arc at the end of the torch. The mask Wicks lent me