Christmas Decorations from Sheet Metal

Hi, I'm Mike with House on the Men and in this video I'm going to show you how my daughter and I made these really fun Christmas decorations out of sheet metal. So let's get started. Well the first thing we did is went to Lowe's or Home Depot and bought a couple two foot by four foot sheets of sheet metal. And your location in the country and the thickness will determine the price but we paid $40 and like $47 for one of each thicknesses of sheets. We then went on the internet searched through for clip art of Santa, candy canes, jingle bells, trees, etc. and found the designs that we liked. Next we took various straight edges and round objects like bowls and garbage can lids with our sharpies to draw out the designs freehand. Giant stocking. That's going to be awesome. Well when it comes to cutting out your designs there's all kinds of options. If you really want to torture yourself you can use a pair of hand shears like this to cut all the way along the lines and wear out your wrists and just feel awful. For straight lines these two devices work great. These little nips hook up to an air compressor. This one hooks up to a drill. They do great with straight lines. Not so much with curves. I had been planning on using this nibbler attachment for my multi-tool but ta-da! I got an early Christmas present. This is a Cut V standard plasma cutter. I got it off of Amazon and it works off of 110 or 230 both with this thin sheet metal just fine. Now Aspen really loves monster trucks and has drawn out her dream vehicle as you can see here so I really wanted to familiarize her with the various aspects of metal fabrication so we decided we're going to use the plasma cutter. When it came time to cut with the plasma cutter as you can see here I used 60 psi and just had both dials right in the middle. Now we use this table right here to cut out each piece in stages. We then smoothed all the jagged edges with a grinder and a flapper wheel attachment. Next let's mark and drill the holes for the zip ties. Right here is the center of our gate. This is our opening gate and there are rollers right over here that I want to make sure don't hit our decoration. So I measured the rollers and they are about 75 and a half inches which is going to be right about up here so I'm going to have to be really close in where I mark the holes to drill for zip ties. Now here's where our decoration is going to go so it's basically going to hang off of this finial. So what I want to do is mark it for drill holes for the zip ties next. Let me spin that around. I'm going to hold that right in there and mark those two and then we're going to want another set here there and why not one more right here. All right now let's drill them out. I'm going to be using these zip ties right here to secure our ornaments. They only have to last a month so I don't care that they're plastic and the sunlight will eventually get to them. They've been working out great for the other ones and the perfect drill hole size for these happens to be 7 30 seconds. Now you could easily use a regular hand drill because this is very soft sheet metal but I have a drill press. It makes the job easier for me so I'm just going to go ahead and use that. I might as well show you the alternate method. So if you want to use a hand drill the thing I would do first is use a little hole punch and punch those holes just to make sure the drill bit doesn't drift off. I plan on stacking all of these ornaments in a solar panel box. It's nice and flat and then I can break them out next year and just put them right back up. So I don't want any of these burrs from the drill holes scratching through the paint of the one underneath it so let's go ahead and take care of those. When it comes time to clean our metal we want to use acetone or paint thinner something to degrease both sides and I like to use rubber gloves for that. Nothing says bah humbug like a fire so oily rags can spontaneously combust therefore you always want to soak them in water. Well if there's a reasonably priced tool that makes my life easier I usually want it and this is no exception. This attachment to my reciprocating saw is made by quick mix or or excuse me mix quick. I'll put a link for it in the description. It's fantastic and when you're done there's just a little strap release here and the paint can comes out. It's just so cool. All right so I've just got a ladder set up with a piece of galvanized bar that we use for conduit and I have a couple of hangers that I've cut the bottoms off of and just bent them up to hold and this is a perfect outdoor little paint stand for us. It's just barely 50 degrees out here in Las Vegas today so we should still be all right. If you're going to be painting indoors because it's too cold or rainy or whatever think about wearing a respirator but we have a nice gentle breeze and we're outside so I'm not going to bother. Light coats is best that way you don't get any drip and obviously since it's bare metal I want to paint both sides. Well there's our first coat. It's a little too windy out today so I brought everything in the garage here and because of that I'm wearing a respirator. Let's let this dry for a little bit. I'm going to give this one more coat and then we can work on the tree. I want to make the star gold and I want to make the trunk brown and I want to make the berries for the holly red. Well it's a beautiful day today so I'm going to take advantage of being outside. I've got a newspaper and tape taping off the star and the tree trunk. I've pre-shaken both cans and let's just get a light coat of each. Let them dry and follow it up with another. All right let that dry one more. Let's do the same with the berries. All right we are getting close to being done so let's put on some ornaments and some garland. I've got this paint. It's like glittery white paint. We're gonna make little stripes of garland across the tree. We'll do that first so then we have spots in mind for where we want to put our ornaments. So I took just a regular kind of paper dixie cup and put a hole or cut the bottom out so it's got a hole. I'm just gonna set it down, shoot paint into it, wipe it down with a towel in between each shot and that should work pretty good. Let's move these out of the way and get going. I found a little image online that I kind of liked with the way the garland is set up so I'm gonna imitate that. That just kind of goes like this. Oops let's get it started. Good. I might have to go white first, huh? There we go and then this one's gonna kind of come down this way. Yeah that's cute and one more across like that. Yeah look at that. That's cool. Now we know where we can put our ornaments. Look at that. I'm just gonna wipe it off with a little rag to make sure I don't get any smudges on the next spot while I'm trying to set it in place. Good. Boom. Blue. Now that we have the white down let's go back and just put a little bit of that glitter over the white. We could even flock it a little bit. That would be kind of cool. There we go. So for the finishing touches I just took a little black paint pen and outlined all the ornaments the tree and the star and I did the same thing for the holly. As you can see here that turned out really nice too. So let's hang these up. I'm going to be using just simple black zip ties. These particular ones are 11 inches long. I'll leave a link for something similar in the description below. You can also just get them at any Home Depot or Lowe's. So I'm gonna preload this top one just like that. So there's a stripe across the front and then just the ones just the parts in the back are sticking out just like that. And then we're gonna slide it through and I like working from the back like this. So slide it through and then I can hold it in place and get up here with one hand and start that zip tie. See that? There. Good. Now that one's tight enough that these little finials here will catch it and then we can take our zip ties and we can load up the rest of these. I got what three more. There's one, two, and three. And then we don't want these flopping around. That just doesn't look good. So let's dress it up with some wire cutters here and there we go. So what do you think? I think they turned out pretty good. It was a really fun project. My daughter got a lot of time on the plasma cutter once we talked about safety and how to use it. I put all the proper equipment on it including the glasses that you need. I'll leave a link to the plasma cutter I got as an early Christmas gift. It worked great on this project. I think it's this is a really fun beginner project for it. Now I'll leave a link for everything that I use in this project other than the stuff I got from the hardware store. Full disclosure those are Amazon affiliate links so if you click on them and end up making a purchase it won't cost you a thing but I do get a small reward at the end of month. It helps to justify the time and the cost it takes to make these videos. Until next time, thank you for watching.