It has happened!  Not even two weeks following my conversation with the artist at my friend’s party in Columbus, OH, I have started on my very first rolling ball sculpture!

I went back and read the referenced post just a moment ago, and was surprised at just how closely the following events had mirrored the conversation.  I did decide to start on a smaller scale, I did decide to use copper, and I am working in my living room (although I did not tear up the carpet…but give it time).

I started work on 8/11/08, having purchased supplies at Lowe’s earlier in the day.  For the curious, this is what the beginnings of a rolling ball sculpture look like:

The orange stuff is a roll of Romex wire, the kind you use if you’re wiring up your house.  It was the easiest way I had of getting a roll of 10 gauge copper wire in bulk.  Still not cheap, but I have it.  The tools are for tooling things, the sockets to the lower right of that are for bending wire around to make curves as are the aerosol can and the silver can to its right.  There’s also a soldering iron and the bits that go with it: flux, brushes, solder.

You’ll notice that, like a good kid, I set a board down on my table so that I don’t burn the tabletop as much and so that my workspace is enlarged. 

The first night I figured out what kind of design element I wanted to start with, and then spent several hours trying to get it shaped.  I also spent an hour on the phone with my engineer brother getting help on figuring out the optimum track width for the two rails the ball will ride on.  This is fun, but there is some definite science that goes into it.  He had to go find a scientific calculator so that we could do a square root problem!  We got the answer, though.  It’s .4 inches, thank you very much.

At the end of the night I had this:

Note the intricately curved piece of wire, dial caliper, and sheet of paper with bending diagram.  Like I said, fun, but not exactly off-the-cuff stuff!  Maybe I make it difficult sometimes, but I wanted a nice, clean bend.  Guess that’s me.

Night two was more wire bending.  This is challenging, because you cant just bend the exact shape you did previously.  The diameters of the curves are different depending on if the wire is following an inside or an outside curve.  It’s pretty demanding to bend everything and get it to line up perfectly, and I’m not really that good at it.  I’m probably 60% there with things as they stand.  Check it:

The picture quality is poor, but you can get the idea that stuff isn’t lining up all nice and nifty like it’s supposed to.  When I got to this point I remembered a phrase I’d read a lot on the Yahoo RBS group: “You’ll have to tweak it.”  I guess my time to tweak has arrived.

Lower down in the photo you can also see a couple of T-shaped pieces.  These are my soldering experiments.  Soldering is used to join copper, and it uses a metal that melts at a relatively low heat point.  Of course, it’s not as easy as holding an iron to it and then sticking the solder wire up against the joint.  Oh no!  There’s proper joint preparation (“Make sure it’s clean!  Use flux!  Make sure the pieces butt together!), and proper soldering technique (“You need something that’ll heat the joint quickly, but not for too long!  Don’t burn it, or the solder won’t stick!  You’ll have to isolate the joint you’re working on or you’ll melt something you already did that’s close to it!”)  This is…fun?

The first night I used a soldering iron that I had.  The results had me less than pleased.  The solder didn’t “flow” on like it was supposed to, it globbed on like chewing gum, or, dare I say it – boogers.  That’s gross, but then so was my solder joint – boogery.  See for yourself:

The one on the right is the first night’s attempt.  See how the solder is all globbed up?  That’s called a “cold” joint.  It’s not sturdy, and looks ugly.  It would most likely vibrate apart if used on the sculpture.

Following that attempt, I got online the next day and read a bunch of posts from the Yahoo group.  I also received some direct email replies to a builder who had used copper in the past.  He told me I needed a torch, like a micro torch or just a plain old plumber’s torch like they use to sweat pipe joints.  I went and bought one.  Right before I quit for the night I made a simple test, and the photo above and below shows the improvement:

In this pic you can see the backside of the work, and it becomes readily apparent just how suck-ass-y the soldered joint really is.  The torched joint on the right is nice and smooth looking.  The soldered joint on the right didn’t even flow around to the back side of the work area.  There’s a big blog of solder on the front, and nothing at all on the back.  Marble-iffic disaster would have surely resulted if such unsound practices were employed on this project.  While this isn’t a nuclear reactor, it’d be a cruel denoument if my sculpture snapped and broke apart piece by piece after I’d completed it.  Now I know it wasn’t just my amateur soldering skills, it was my tools.  Since I’m set up with some decent tools now, I should be set with solder joints…until something else comes up to frustrate me.

So there we are, kids!  Two days closer to marble-rolling bliss!  I can’t wait to see the finished product – I have no clue what it’s going to look like, and I can make it do absolutely ANYTHING I want it to do!