First finished piece - would you sell it or keep it?

I think you should absolutely sell the first piece. Keeping it in your shop is fine for practice, but getting someone outside your circle to pay for it is the ultimate test of quality. It proves you can translate a conceptual idea into something that someone else views as valuable enough to invest in. I sold my initial decorative fire pit a couple of years ago after I finished it, and the quick sale was a huge confidence boost for future projects. When I priced it, I focused on the time spent rather than just material cost. I clocked maybe twelve hours of focused work on that specific piece, accounting for the grinding and cleanup after the welding was done. I added a labor rate that felt fair to me, plus a percentage for consumable stuff like flux and gas. For a one-off like your stacked panel, look at it as a commissioned piece rather than a retail item.

Don't worry too much about the tiny flaws right now. Every piece has them. Customers who buy artistic metalwork are ussually looking at the overall impact and the execution, not necessarily the microscopic imperfections. Once you get into this, the market feedback from a sale will tell you exactly where your technique is strong and where you need to refine your craft. It's all part of the learning curve.

I think the advice about selling your first great project is a bit rushed. When I first started with welded structures, I actually kept my first six completed pieces even when they were finished. Selling them immediately felt like passing off a prototype before I realy knew the limits of what I was capable of making.

For me, that initial project is a benchmark. It proves the technique works, but the value is in the learning curve. I made a similar shelving unit using 3/16 inch mild steel a couple of years back. I spent three months making it before I ever considered a price tag. I needed that extra time to get comfortable with the jig I designed and to perfect the penetration on those crucial corner welds.

You need to understand your process before you start worrying about the market. Keeping that first piece allows you to refer back to it and see how much your skill has improved since then. You can sell subsequent pieces, maybe even that one later, but the initial piece shoud probly stay in your shop as a reference point for future work. It shows the journey, not just the final product.

Not sure I buy the 'customers don't notice flaws' bit. They might not see a wrinkle in a weld, but paint shows everything - a scratch, a dimple under the white, it all pops once it's cured and sitting in someone's living room light. I made that mistake on a painted steel sign once and had to redo the finish. If it's going out the door, wet sand between coats and check it outside in daylight before you call it done. Bare metal forgives more than white paint ever will.

That piece sounds like the kind of thing my old shop teacher would've had us form over a wooden buck with a rawhide mallet, no welder required. Anyway, on the pricing question, hours plus materials always undersells art in my experiance. I started charging what felt almost embarrassing, and folks paid it. Whatever you do, take photos before it leaves the shop, you'll want them later.

This whole thread has me wondering something basic. When you say the panels stack up in a spiral, are the layers actually attached to each other, or do they just sit on top of one another? I tried making a little garden ornament out of leftover metal scraps last summer and my stacked pieces kept sliding around untill I welded little tabs underneath to lock them in place. Took me forever to figure that out. Would a base like that work on something as big as what you built, or does the bending hold everything steady on its own?