Making a Fire Pit from a 55 Gallon Oil Drum

[Music] hey guys welcome back to the art of craftsmanship my name is Dustin and today you can see that I have this reclaimed 55-gallon drum I'm gonna be using to make into a fire pit now I'm gonna cut it in half vertically I'm going to rig up some legs for it maybe do a little bit of welding and make the top for it as well first thing I need to do is remove all the paint off of it because I have a cool pattern in mind to paint on this later in the build I'm gonna mark off about halfway up this may be a little bit more than halfway and I'll mark it off the tape it's because I only need to grind the bottom half the part that I'll be using for the fire pit later on I'll measure everything out specifically and mark it off exactly where I want it before I do [Music] well huh looks really good guys I'm really happy with that so now we have a nice fresh surface to work on we can move on to our next step and as you guys can probably tell here there's a little bit of rust on this we're just sitting on the ground overnight and just the dew from the ground a little bit on the other side as well so I did pick up some high temp spray paint I'm gonna head and clean this rust off then we're gonna cut the barrel in half and when we get to get that first coat of paint on just to keep anything else from rusting [Music] I bring my framing square to the top and actually use the top of the barrel to do a square line running straight down the edge based off of the mark that I used across the top of my barrel I'm just gonna keep working my way around from that mark square up on the other end and I'll flip the bear over and do the other side the same way and then we'll connect both those lines on the end of this this end of the barrel I will switch back over to the disk and we'll cut it in half [Music] [Music] [Music] I'm gonna prepare my surface by just sanding everything once over with some 220 and then we gonna clean everything up and a lot of people a lot of you guys have commented that I should be using acetone to clean metal and things off instead of mineral spirits and I know that it was just I was using up what I had left off but I did recently picked up some more acetone so I'll use that to clean everything get a nice clean surface before we spray paint [Music] I have two different color spray paints and these are both high-temperature grill spray paints so it's good for up to 2,000 degrees I'm going to cover everything now with the light gray and then we'll put a mask over it later and we'll spray it all again with the black and then we'll peel the mask off to reveal a pretty cool pattern all right now we're gonna let this try before we put our second coat on and while we're waiting for that we're going to draw the pattern for how I want to do the lid I have my template I'm going to be using this to mark off everything after I measure it all to make Windows in the top of this and then later I'll cut those out and I'll put it in screen underneath of it for the lid before I cut out the windows of the angle grinder I'm going to drill each of the corners with a 1/2 inch drill bit to get nice clean radiuses [Music] [Music] [Music] now that I have all the windows cut out I'm going to go back and I'll clean up all the edges to get all the sharp dates off and then I'll grind off all the paint [Music] [Music] I'm gonna stop for the day but I did want to say that I had kind of I was testing out these two different wire wheels now this is a twisted wire cup and this is a twisted wire wheel and after using the wire wheel on the first half and the wire a couple in the second half I do kind of I figured out that I do like the wire wheel a little better so if you're gonna do this project I would suggest getting definitely a twisted wire wheel works really well and one like this probably better than the wire cut [Music] [Music] I'm gonna use a piece of the cutoff from the lid to make tabs for the top of the lid now the tabs are going to be there to support the lid when you put it on top so it doesn't just fall off so I have a piece here I'm gonna clean it off a little bit just grind the edges smooth flatten it and I'll cut each of my tabs out on the bandsaw [Music] [Music] [Music] I'm gonna mark all of my holes now where I'm going to be drilling through to attach them to the lid and then I also want to mark a line down the middle because I'm going to bend each tab just a little bit so that way when you put it on top they're bent in and they grab that inner edge of the bottom actual pit nice and easily [Music] [Music] I'm going to be attaching these tabs using aluminum pop rivets [Music] [Music] look at that nice and all those tabs were bent in just two just enough to put it in place stays on really well I might have to adjust there just a little bit but make it a little easier to go in but that looks really nice [Music] I picked up this piece of metal lathe mesh at a hardware store I'll be using this as the screen for the top of the fire pit I'm gonna be attaching this with pop rivets but I'll use bigger washers on the inside to hold it together [Music] [Music] right [Music] let us fit in there perfectly he's as good as to show you that every once in a while things work out exactly the way you planned sometimes even better [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] oh man that looks great some sort of crazy medieval steampunk device armor I don't know that's awesome the handle on get some legs on a few more things and yeah almost there for the legs for the base I'm gonna use this old bed frame that I have and it has this really cool scrollwork at the top of it that I got from a scrapyard and I had it around kind of hanging out as scrap steel that I knew I could use in some project at some point and this is gonna work perfectly because the scroll will just look really cool as feet so I measured out about that I need about 12 inches or so mark that off on the bed frame and I just used my four inch angle grinder to cut off all of those pieces so that way I have everything to basically the general size that I want and I'll bring it inside trim off all the extra bits with the metal band saw and then grind everything down and get it exactly how I want it before I bolt it onto the base [Music] [Applause] you can kind of see my vision for these so these will kind of be like here somewhere around there two here and two on the other side and I'll bolt those on but I need to clean these up so I'm gonna clean them up with the grinder first get everything the way I want it and then we'll clean off all the old paint with the wire wheel [Music] [Music] [Music] i ground off all of the paint the black paint off of these legs you can see there's some of this pink primer left behind I didn't worry about grinding that off because it's primer so it's nice and secured to the steel but I got all that black paint from the outside off of all four pieces so I'm ready to trim these down I'm going to trim them down probably about four or five inches shorter than they are now and I'm gonna cut this at a steep angle so that way it's just not a harsh edge right on on the bottom of my fire pit [Music] I'm putting two holes here the first one starts two and a quarter inches back from the end and then I go an inch and a quarter up there's the second one so one inch and then an inch and a quarter [Music] [Music] [Music] these are all a little bit too big just a smidge bigger than the actual piece of steel so I'm gonna go ahead and chuck this into my drill and run this on the grinder will do eight of them and make them just a little smaller figure out where I want this first one to go I'll just tie it up and mark it with a pencil and we'll measure everything out and do it on all four sides [Music] [Music] also it's so great nice and strong that's awesome super happy with that super please turn out perfectly this is my scrap left over from the tabs that I made for the lid so I'm going to use this piece to make a handle out of and you're going to trace my pattern on and I'll show you guys how I do that now this handle this here in the middle once this is up we're going to round these over then these two here will be the verticals on either side that'll bring the handle up off and then the two tabs on the end will be riveted on to the top of the lid so we'll go ahead and drill out all the corners first and then we'll cut this out as much as we can with the bandsaw and with a grinder [Music] throw them inside let's just be out here last one so you guys would probably screaming at me on the film because you saw me drilling this on the wrong side so I drew this last I drilled this last hole on the wrong side of the line of course so fortunately I have enough material here I have another three inch strip so I'm just going to go ahead and redraw my pattern on that strip and I'll drill the holes again [Music] [Music] so I cleaned off all the pain I got this ready to shape now we're gonna shake the handle and I have this cold chisel that's almost the same circumference as this three-inch piece of sheet steel so I'll clamp it in the vise and start rounding it over start shape a little bit down now by hand yeah that's good and I like there's this a little bit of a gap here which actually I think works well because if it's too close together if I try to close that up and it might tend to actually pinch your fingers when you lift up on it with the gap there it's not going to pinch it's not enough to actually close up and pinch your fingers so I'm pretty happy with that looks good feels good I'm gonna cheat the rest and attach it [Music] [Music] nice that's great [Music] [Music] was a 16-gauge piece of steel that I picked up at the local hardware store just this one piece of steel cost me thirty seven dollars which is the reason why I'm always looking for a sheet steel and scrap steel things like that to make projects out of because when you buy something new like this it's way more expensive than this is gonna be the most expensive part of the whole project and it's just for the bottom get those scraps hang onto them because you know that it's going to come in handy at some point to make some type of project [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] all right that's the last hole the drainage holes got all the hardware on everything's ready to go they're all ready for paint windy out today [Music] [Music] [Music] right looks awesome and I'm really happy with that it's actually looks better than I thought it would that electrical tape worked really well and I loved it it adds just it's just a little bit of detail a little bit of art - you know something fairly simple she look really good and match the top well [Music] alright guys well thank you so much for watching this has been a fun couple days it's really nice to go to work outside of the shop in the shop a little bit and make this really nice fire but I'm really excited to have this I love having fires outside and this is gonna be a great addition to our property here so we're gonna sit back and relax and have a couple beers and enjoy this fire this beautiful evening and if your make something like this you take inspiration from our projects we'd love to see work that you're doing so please send us those to Instagram or to order craftsmanship either one you know you can send us emails or tag me on Instagram I'd love to see your work so thank you guys all so much for watching and we'll see you in the next video [Music] [Music]

Channel: The Art of Craftsmanship

Views: 798,916

Rating: 4.7886024 out of 5

Keywords: making a fire pit, making an oil drum fire pit, oil drum fire pit, fire pit, no weld fire pit, 55 gallon drum fire pit, 55 gallon drum, fire pit from an oil drum, diy fire pit

Id: wrkRtEkOlBE

Length: 36min 6sec (2166 seconds)

Published: Tue May 26 2020