After having almost two weeks of nothing but being too busy for anything except work and dumb crap like laundry, grocery shopping, and sleep, I finally was able to get some more work done on the RBS last weekend, and a little bit this week as well. It has been unbelievably fulfilling and rewarding, and I’m pretty freakin’ jazzed about the whole thing. Matter of fact, it kind of bugs me right now that I’m doing this blog entry instead of working on it, but I need to keep up to date before I end up with a bazillion pictures that all need to be posted in one all-night blogstravaganza (which isn’t as fun as it sounds, believe me).
Before digging into my own project, however, I’m going to throw out examples of other’s work. I realized while talking to my sister this morning, that I’ve told some of my friends all about the myriad details of this type of sculpture, but have given no examples of what it looks like or does.
Here’s one of my favorite examples. It was probably the first RBS I ever saw in my life. It was a sequence shown on Sesame Street when I was a littl’un, and was also, coincidentally, the directorial debut of Frank Oz of Muppets fame, or at least that’s how rumor has it. I’ve been unable to verify that little tidbit. At any rate, here’s the fun little 1-2-3 Red Ball sequence.
1-2-3 Red Ball on Sesame Street
I had completely forgotten about that until I found it on Youtube a few weeks ago. I’d love to have seen what the entire structure looked like all at once. What kind of blows me away on this is the unbelievable amount of metalwork that is built into the supports. There’s no way I’m stitching together that many wires just for visual effect! (Well, not yet, anyway…)
The sort of thing I am working on will more closely resemble this next video. The guy who builds these is named Matthew Gaulden, and his site can be found here. His stuff is pretty advanced compared to what I’m doing, and he’s working in stainless steel instead of copper, but the basic ideas and function are similar to what I want to achieve. This video also does a good job of highlighting a lot of little track elements, like spirals, gates, and loops.
I hope to some day build something as awesome as this one, but I’m starting relatively small and simple(?) for my first effort.
What I’ve managed to accomplish this past week is some track building an the construction of a track splitter or switch.
This is an historical photo. It’s the first successful track joint I managed to solder together after at least three attempts. Turns out you need to use a full-sized plumber’s torch to get even a small amount of copper wire like this heated up properly. Even though this isn’t a museum-quality solder joint, it’s still far good enough to hold my track together. There was some yay-ing and woohoo-ing when this happened.
This photo shows more track progress as I got my second joint together. You can see how I have to move along the piece and space apart the supports appropriately. Unlike Frank Oz, I’m not using a million little fine bits of wire, but one short U-shaped piece. I want to get this done in 2008, after all.
Here you can see the finished piece of track (Yay!), plus the frame of 1/2-inch copper pipe that I managed to solder together. Copper isn’t very stiff, so it’s necessary to make a frame that the track can essentially hang from. I may have to bolster the frame later after I finish the piece and test it. I’ve been told that I may be surprised in finding out how much the marbles make the track vibrate and shake from side to side.
This photo is kind of dark, but it’s a closeup of the finished track section with my nice little solder joints all solid and working correctly. I put a marble on this thing right after it was done and just kept rolling it through the curves repeatedly. Yeah, I looked like I was about five, but it’s amazing how satisfying a little rolling marble is after about three weeks of what seemed like no progress whatsoever. Also, you’ll not that the piece of paper the track is sitting on has some scribbles on it. These are actually diagrams for the track splitter I was making at the time. The splitter allows you to send alternate marbles from one piece of track onto one of two tracks – effectively splitting your track into two courses instead of just one. This makes it a lot more visually interesting. It also makes for a lot more work on the part of the builder. What can I say, I like a challenge.
Oh, the agony! The piece I was dealing with is those little copper bits that are clamped, pinched, squeezed, and clipped in place. Hanging off the left lower side is a hemostat, then immediately to its right is one of the alligator clips for the “third hand” that is holding the whole mess up. Above the clip is the work piece with two of my homemade bar clamps screwed down on a couple of wires. To the right of those is another clip from the third hand, and then below that clip you can see the giant pair of Vice Grips holding…something. I don’t even remember why that was there – maybe just to keep the thing from sagging.
So what is that? One, two, three…six. Six clips/clamps holding that whole mess together. It probably took me an hour to clamp it all up and balance it just right for soldering. After I got it soldered I pulled the clamps off and looked at it. Great! Well, pretty good. There was this *one teeny tiny little itsy-bitsy* piece that needed just a touch of solder on it to make it perfect. I aimed the torch at it for about three seconds, and the whole thing fell apart. Okay, one piece stayed on, but the rest just sucked up that tiny bit of heat, remelted my fresh joints, and a bunch of little copper sticks hit the table. It was late. I didn’t even have energy to get mad. I just turned the light off and went to bed. Tomorrow would be different, I vowed. I’d learned, and now I would do it over, and do it better.
Voila! Here is the second attempt, for which I purchased a eight little alligator clips, three of which you can see in this photo. This allowed me to get everything fitted together more easily and much more quickly. It also made it easier to get the torch in there and solder it. This time things went very well, and though my joints are still not quite works of art, it looks…
Awesome! This thing will tip back and forth and let the marbles go right or left to different tracks. So, yeah, about four hours of work to make a little wiry thing that tips from side to side. Let’s hope the learning curve is steep on this stuff, otherwise we’re looking at a completion date of around March 2009. Bah!
Back to work, kids. I’ve got wire to bend.