PORC Series Trophies – Hows it’s Made

Home » PORC Series Trophies – Hows it’s Made

At the beginning of the race series, Mike asked if I was interested in making some trophies for the overall winners. This was something I was dead keen on so I began planning something that would be awesome, but simple to make….I couldn’t come up with anything that was going to be easy and time started to run out. So I had to do something awesome, but somewhat difficult to make, instead.

Making the numbers was the first thing I took on. Brazing the 1s for a nice gold finish and stainless steel for the 2s. I drew the numbers using a stencil and cut the shapes with an angle grinder. Then did the final shaping with a linisher (basically a sanding belt)

PORCTrophy — Making steel rusty, on purpose…

The 3’s would take longer. I wanted a rusty finish for the bronze effect, so I had to leave some steel outside in the rain. I added salt into the equation to try and speed things up a bit.

Tubes were the next things on the list, lucky we have a bit pile of offcuts to dig through!

Scrap Bin. Thats a pretty expensive pile of useless tubing. #offcuts

3 stages of tube preparation

From left to right:

Straight from the scrap bin, Notched and dirty, Finished tube with both the inside and outside polished before welding.

I used The Notchmaster, our homebrew tube notching machine, to create the shapes in the tube. And a sanding attachment for the drill to clean the scale out of the inside of the tubes

These tubes were chewed up by the lathe 🙁

All the tubes for the First place trophies ready to go. This took a long time…

All tacked together and ready for welding, First place trophies

I used a stainless steel filler rod during the welding process. This was to try and get a bit more colour into the weld and hopefully make the overall trophy look a little cooler. I’d say it’s worked pretty good here!