The Big Gate Project is nearing fruition, but I've hit a small snag.
This is a gate hinged to go up and down (I know of them as 'scissors' gates, but others have argued with that moniker -- so I'm not going to _call_ it anything but damned heavy). To make it manageable, it's got some great big springs to counterbalance it.
I need to modify the spring mount -- the gate works fine except that when you manually operate it the thing tends to crash, which fractures the welds, which is bad news. So I want to extend the spring mount on the gate, move one or two things on the base, and put a honking big damper on the thing so that it eases shut instead of thumping into cement with a great big crash.
The problem is that the spring mount on the gate appears to be stainless, or at least some really high-alloy steel. It's shiny, even after having been out in the weather for years, and the former property owner who built the gate did all sorts of contract-built fixtures for hospitals, all out of stainless, so it'd be a natural material for him to use.
Rather than taking a guess at what it's made out of and trying to put a heavily stressed extension onto a 1" diameter bar of Mystery Metal, I want to cut it off and weld on something whose origins I can vouch for.
If it _is_ stainless, can I just whack that thing off with a regular old cutting torch? Or do I need to sweat my way through multiple saw blades, cut-off wheels, and grinder wheels to get it off?