Step 1: Turn tank upside down.
Accomplished!
Step 2: Remove ring from former bottom (now top) of drum-to-be.
This is where the difficulty starts to ramp up. But working for 15 minutes with a rusty old monkey wrench I found in my mother-in-law's garage got it done!
 |
But it left welds, which this cat didn't seem to care about, but I simply can't have on the surface of my drum.
 |
Step 3: Remove welds.
And the serious business begins. To practice with my rotary tool, I started attacking one of the welds. Initially fun, but INCREDIBLY TERRIBLY NOISY, as mentioned before. So I got some earplugs and moved out to the garage. Now it's just fun and dangerous feeling, with a big, satisfying spray of sparks (as I said before, I'm not really all that handy, this is all still new and exciting to me, so the sparks are so bright and pretty...). The going was very slow, so I got a hammer and chisel. That wasn't really working any better, so it's back to the rotary tool.
 |
And that's where I'm at. I didn't have as much time as I'd hoped this weekend, so I'm still just slowly wearing down all the excess metal welded to the future playing surface. It looks small in these pictures, but there's a fair bit to wear down. This is something I'm not even sure how someone more mechanically inclined would do - it's not like you can use a reciprocating saw for this part. Maybe heating them would help, but I'm not gonna start playing with fire just yet. I'm hoping that once I get down to cutting the actual tongues I'll find the welds are thicker than the actual tank, but I'm not counting on it. I could be in for the long haul here.
