My First MegaTree

I have just finished building the frame for my first 2D mega Tree and thought I would share the construction.

The frame is made entirely of aluminium and will have 5v 30 pixel/m strip

This is the framework being cut and sized


Welding the frame together using MIG welder.


Completed frame ready to paint


I finished painting it today and look forward to adding the pixel strips soon.
Starting to get exciting now......

Looks good

awesome did you just use the aluminium wire in your mig welder might look at that way for a matrix

Yes and no.... feed wire is aluminium, but it must have 'Argon' shielding gas. So you need a full gas mig welder with Argon. Cleaning is super important too, any contaminants will upset the weld badly, cleaning with stainless steel brush just before welding does the trick nicely.

The nice thing about this frame is it is ultra light and solid, with luck it should be durable and survive the coastal winds we get here in summer, time will tell.

Looks great

Looks great Daryl. once you get lights on it you can build me some gear! lol

Looks good Daryl.

Most impressive, what size is it ?
Cheers
Fing

Very professional looking. Well done.

Looks great. Are the legs 2.5m long. Look forward to seeing some lights on it

Thanks for all the supportive comments, I am really excited to be building my first real hand made xmas display.

The tree has 2.5m upright bars, so I can use one 5m strip for 2 legs.

The center supporting bar is 3m x 25mm x 25mm aluminium box section. This gives enough extra length for a base mount and a for the star on top.

The individual bars are 12mm x 3mm x 2.5m with the supporting cross bars being 19mm angle.

I will be using 5v, 30 LEDs per meter black strip lights.

I decided to use aluminium for the light weight and strength, and also welded rather than pop rivets for strength too. It is now painted black to reduce any reflections. I like my lights to be as invisible as possible until they come on.

All you guys on here are so inspirational, it is awesome to see all the stuff you have done and sharing all your build info... got me totally excited to have a go myself.....

Thanks guys...

DarylW said:

So you need a full gas mig welder with Argon.

Click to expand...

What does one of these run ?


I did Arc and gas welding a while back, so I might be willing to give it a try.
Will this welder work with 1/4 inch wireframes as well or would you recommend a different welder


-Blu

Nice. I was planning to make something similar but I need it to be 5m long so I will probably need to design it so it can break down. I also have some other ideas because I need it to be a tree shape in December and a horizontal rectangle shape for May. So I was think I could have the ends bolt into cross beams and then I remove all the bolts and rotate the bars and reattach to new cross beams with different spacing when I need to change the orientation.

Very nice
Jealous of your talent

I am not a welding expert, this is my first aluminium job ever, but it went really well.

Mig Welders are capable of welding very fine and thin material, this is one of the main features of these machines.

I am sure there are others here that could offer much more advice than me on this subject.

Now if you want some advice on really big computers... then I might be able to help out...