Welding a modern chandelier for the M Bedroom

The master bedroom has a comically small light fixture.

When looking at chandeliers, I came across this light, which I thought would look good in the long master bedroom.

It was on Craigslist for $500 NIB from Restoration Hardware. Uhh no. I have a welder and know how to wire a lamp. It's on!

I decided I wanted it to be 18"x4' for some reason. 4' long and 4' tall seemed the right max size for the room. 18x48 inches would be 1.5'x4 or 3:8 ratio. Is that a good aesthetic ratio? We'll see:

This is a bad weld. It's sitting on top. You want better penetration.

I am NOT a good welder. But that's what the grinder is for.

You can see the line between the pieces where the weld can break again

Here's my lil welder setup. It's a Lincoln 125A "pro-sumer" welder with .035 flux core and the option to add gas. Mask is auto darkening from Harbor Freight. $40 but soo cool.

Even with my little easy welder, it's still hard to get it a good weld. The two knobs are simply amps and wire speed. There's a chart under the side flap of the welder that tells you what settings to use. It says flux core .035 should be set to current B and wire speed 1. That's low current and slow wire speed. You want the current and speed settings so that it makes a bead that melts into the metal a bit.

It's been a lot of trial and error, mainly due to crappy welds - they have to be ground down and then some crack and have to be re-welded and re-ground etc.

I want to hide the wire in the fixture. It's going to be hard to fish it through

This galvanized eyelet fit into the steel tubing nicely

It's pretty difficult to drill this material so I marked out the holes with a utility knife buy scratching an X so that the countersink bit would have something to sit into and start in the right place.

I added some decorative wires to echo the shape of the ceiling

It's coming along but certainly not going easy. It's been pretty hard to thread the holes for the "lamp nipples" with a tap (tapered thread cutter). Fortunately none of this needs to be super strong.

I started trying to fish the "lamp cord" 16-2 wire through. I thought it would simply want to bend and turn the corner if I pushed it but it was too limp. Then I tried to push bailing wire through the same way but it also was too limp. Christina suggested I get some pull chain because it would feed by gravity. She was right.