Heavy Metal Flag started when I was looking for a nice solid outdoor flag to add to a big open wall in my back yard patio. I didn’t want a fabric flag – I have one of those on the front of the house – I wanted something that looked really solid, heavy, shiny. Searching all the usual places (aka Amazon) I found a ton of cheap-looking sheet metal flags and a bunch of stuff that I figured was probably just Chinese import junk that would last a year at most. I could not find anyone selling what I had in mind, so I figured I’d make something.
After a bunch of hunting around for parts and ideas I experimented with some scrap c-channel I had laying around, and settled on a design using c-channel in alternating directions to get what I think is a really cool-looking depth for the stripes.
Paint was going to be the real make-or-break part of the process. I could have gone down to Home Deposit and bought a couple cans of rattle-can paint, but I decided instead to paint it like a car so it would last a long time.
After a lot of messing around to find the best way to weld the parts together to avoid having them curl up as metal tends to do when it gets hot, and how to make the star field end up being super-smooth, I settled on my design.
The finished product looked pretty cool hanging on my wall. I added some rope light to keep it lit at night, and messed around with the design a little to work out the best way to hang something this heavy without having to do a bunch of damage to the wall.
With everything done, it looked great! I got to thinking that maybe I wasn’t the only person who wanted a real solid showpiece flag for their house or company, so why not offer them for sale? Well, here we are, selling custom-made showpiece heavy metal flags.
Making these flags left me with a bunch of scrap metal so I got to thinking about what I could do with all that scrap. From the scrap came the Heavy Metal Game Board. One of these days I’ll buy a CNC platform for my plasma cutter so I can start making the game pieces for the board.