Trellis roof

As I said, this was the only part where I fired up the forge and got to do some hammering. Since Meghan is into Chinese martial arts and other exercise forms (like Qigong), I thought to have the trellis have a pagoda-reminiscent top. There's not much more to explain here, as it's just four nearly identical pieces of tapered and scrolled 3/8" square bar plus a short tapered 3/8" square for the spike up top. Architecturally, it's called a "finial". There was lots of welding to fill in the inside corners at the finial.

The challenge for me on forging things like this is getting all the scrolls to be close to identical, which they needed to be to not look goofy. I always forge one and use that as a pattern for the others, laying the new pieces on the pattern, but that doesn't always get close enough. That's when I lay them on my welding table and use a torch to tweak things in. The trick with using a torch is to heat up a long section so that you don't have irregular curves.

The other fun part was welding them all together so that the finished piece sat flat on the table, each leg was at right angles to their neighbors, and the finial pointed 90° vertically. Torching long sections of each long "leg" and then pressing down until flat worked for me. Getting them 90° to each other required some guidelines on my table, plus a few wood clamping forms, but nothing crazy.

Ignore the welds tying the top to the support bars. Those were mainly tack welds to hold enough for me to line the entire thing up.