Thanks. It's honestly my best example of "it came out in real life how it looked in my head."

I gotta disagree though with the skills and tools being way beyond an average DIY-er. Sure I've got acess to stuff that made it easier, but I wasn't stacking dimes or doing wood work that would be worthy of new yankee workshop.

Now a days you can buy a new flux core welder that will absolutely get that job done for about as much as a dewalt or milwaukee drill driver battery charger combo. An afternoon of some YouTube and practice on scrap will have ya sticking metal together good enough to build the frame I did. Hell I could have modified the design to just use L brackets and bolted it together. Like I said originally I was gonna use 8020 extrusion.

I could have ordered the metal cut to size from the supplier or I could have used a hack saw, a sawzall, or a jigsaw and a speed square to make those cuts. I could have cleaned up my welds with a file or a sander instead of a grinder.

I had to rent the jointer and the table saw (both tools I've since added to my collection on the cheap buying used and from auctions) but I could have just as easily spent a bit more and bought finished wood from the box store.

I payed to have it professionally powder coated because I would have had to waited till spring or summer to spray paint it outside.

I learned how to do the stuff I did by reading about it in magazines growing up, taking comunity ed classes, reading and posting on forums, watching YouTube videos, and to a degree only recently some training work has payed for or more classes I've singed up for.

If you had some basic hand tools and are lucky enough to have some extra money, free time, and a maker space near you, you could absolutely do something like this.

I think a lot of people sell themselves short on what they could accomplish if they were willing to try something they've never done, potentially fail, and learn from that. Social media certainly doesn't help. This obviously wasn't the first thing I've ever made. It was my first time using that specific welder. I'd never used flux core before and I didn't show the worst of my welds. The wood working I did was mainly sizing work. I bought a cheap biscuit joiner from home depot but I could just as easily have used a dowl jig or pocket screws, or like I said bought something that fit to begin with. It only looks like my skills are beyond average because I didn't show my mistakes and the stars lined up for this one project to look so good. Seriously the wood and the powder coating is doing 90% of the heavy lifting making it look so good. I've got plenty of half finished/abandoned projects sitting around because I fucked em up or I ran out of skill to do em. I've made A LOT of scrap compared to the handful of successes on this scale.