Tag Archives: steel

Yes, it takes that long!

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Sometimes I beat myself up in this whole creation process. The expense of time is something that really gets to me at present, because I don’t have near as much free time to create art as I would like to have. If I work on a project, or even a portion of one, and it takes longer than I think it should, I can be pretty hard on myself about my supposed “poorly managed time.” Most of the time this is totally unreasonable. Actually, maybe it’s always unreasonable.

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Today’s post is a perfect example of that. I conceived the basket assembly shown here as a means to keep the marbles from accidentally being dropped onto the glass plant terrarium that will hang near where the marbles are loaded. It was an excellent and attractive solution to the problem. In my head it was very straightforward. It seemed like such a simple solution couldn’t take much time: basket, wires, welding. Two hours, maybe three? No.

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I wound up spending hours and hours on it, perhaps six. My first reaction was, “What! How could that take so long! It’s just – it’s just a bunch of semicircles in a frame! That shouldn’t have take so long to do! I should have known better! I must not be working fast enough! How could I let all that time slip by?”

rbsbasket3

Later I stepped back and did some really quick, really basic math. There are 28 upright pieces forming the sides of the basket. Each of those pieces required on tack weld to hold it in place, so that’s 28 welds right there. Then I had to go back and tack weld them at the other end so that both ends were secure, making 56 welds.

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Once everything was tacked and secured, I went back over all of them on both the inside and the outside of the basket using filler wire to create attractive finish welds that would also be completely solid and sturdy, assuring that no amount of vibration from loading the marbles would ever cause one of the welds to break. That makes four additional welds for each “leg.” Four welds times 28 equals 112 more welds. Add that to the tack welds and we have 168 welds.

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Two main pieces form the upper lip. Adding those pieces to each other made for at least four more welds, probably six. Now we’re up to 174 welds.

One hundred seventy-four welds. How long does it take to make a single weld? Not too long, a few seconds at most. For many of those welds, however, I didn’t just make the weld. Most of the weld joints were not conveniently positioned. I had to move the sculpture, rotate it one way or another, lay it on its back, turn it upside down, I even had to clamp other pieces of metal onto the sculpture so I’d have a place to rest my hands while welding. That all adds to the build time.

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And all of that doesn’t take into account the time I took designing it, bending the wire to the right shape, cutting and fitting all the pieces together. I was really lucky if something fit together on the first try. More often than not I had to grind things to fit just right. More time.

Oh, and cleaning! Let’s not forget the cleaning. That was fun to do after it was all burnt and ugly looking, but it still added time to the build process.

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It ended up taking three or four days of available time to complete. Considering all that, well, I didn’t do too badly. Most of the pieces I create for these sculptures are completely individual, even to me. A big part of why I do what I do is the individuality and uniqueness of each piece. It means that certain things are just going to take a long time. The big benefit to all that effort, however, is that not even I can create two works that will be exactly alike. I hope the results speak for themselves.

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So I’m going to keep practicing not being so hard on myself, save time where and when I can, and keep working to produce truly unique and special pieces of moving art. How’s that sound?

Challenging myself and new sculpture video for “Dropping In”

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It has been a tremendously productive past few months, and here is one more result of my decision to create one new piece a week for as long as possible. There’s been a change in plans, but I’ll fill you in on that later. For now, news and video on the new sculpture!

Titled “Dropping In,” I deliberately made an effort to create something different with this one. I’d had a thought around the beginning of the year for a method of creating track that would be rather quick, but also brought with it some limitations. However, limitations always translate into a pattern of thought like this: “Hmmm…I could do that, but that would mean I couldn’t do these other things. Huh. What if I couldn’t do those other things? That seems like a bad thing, but it just means I have to find another way of reaching my goal. If I can’t do X, then…then the challenge is to find a Y that will resolve the issue, and quite possibly be awesome in the process!”

This line of thinking worked its way around in my head for a while. Then “Lunar Walk” showed up on my work bench piece by piece, and I realized it was time to play around with some of those ideas. Turns out they worked pretty well! The sculpture looks really cool and is different from what you very often see with rolling ball sculpture. I enjoyed building it and its function. Even better, when other people got a look at it, they liked it as well. Success!

Once that piece was done I was ready to engage in my idea 100%. I was going to make a bunch of perfectly straight track sections in a whole batch and then…well, I didn’t know what, but there was only one way to find out!

Turns out it really was a challenge. Curves create a certain type of feel. They also allow for gradual changes in depth and speed. I was losing a lot of advantages in some areas, but it just made me more determined to figure out something cool with my idea.

I suppose I could have made my track sections bowed or wavy, but I really wanted to go with the idea of making this piece with nothing but straight, flat track. I could see something in my head that really wanted to take shape. Once I started laying the completed track sections out on the work bench, things really began clicking. The “steps” portion of the sculpture just seemed too perfect, and I was getting excited about the bigger challenge of keeping the track only gradually sloped so that the marble wouldn’t roll too quickly. Anyone who builds RBS will tell you that controlling roll speed at a slow pace is difficult!

When the basic track route was laid out I started welding some of the pieces together. I had no specific frame in mind, but once I started looking at the steps taking shape it snapped in place: strutted uprights! I immediately thought, “Oh, man, now you’ve done it. That’s going to take a LOT more time!” Remember, I was trying to get this piece done within one week. Just building one upright with struts is time-consuming, but here I had the idea for a triangulated piece. That was going to take even more than triple the time it took to make a single-sided one! Nevertheless, I knew the idea was perfect. I couldn’t NOT build it after having seen it in my head.

Hours of work followed. The uprights turned out great, but required a good deal of patience in setup and welding to keep them from warping horribly. The track worked with the frame visually even better than I could have hoped! Keeping the track sections slanted at just the right angle took additional patience and lots of adjustment, but once I had it working it was right on.

I’m very pleased with the end result on this one. I imagine that it is not to the taste of everyone, but I appreciate its uniqueness, and I’m sure there is someone else that feels this one is just right for them. I was also struck with the idea that the open area in the sculpture could be used as a mounting point for an award or a photograph that I could add at the client’s request. I know if I worked somewhere, say an engineering firm, and I was given this piece of art with a plaque affixed to it, I’d be a lot happier than if I got the usual brass and wood plaque from a trophy shop. This is one to remember! Plus, every single person coming in the office would want to play with it! How many other trophies can do that?

As mentioned earlier, my goal has been one new piece a week for several month’s worth of time. I have just received two new sculpture commissions, both of which have me extremely excited! These are larger works that will take some time to complete, so the small pieces will be on hold for a while, but I will continue to update here with other news as I have it.

Thanks to everyone who supports my work. I appreciate your efforts in forwarding my videos and putting up comments on various internet outlets. You help me do bigger and better things!

“Opportunity” Rolling Ball Sculpture Completed!

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It has taken me nearly a year and a half to create, but my largest, most ambitious rolling ball sculptured, “Opportunity,” is finally complete! A commission received back in November of 2011 started the whole project moving. Since it was of a size and scope that I’d not tackled before, I had to make some adjustments. I had to tear out a shower that someone had built in my basement back in the 60s. I had to install more shop lighting. I had to build a wooden frame onto which I could mount the sculpture as I built it. There was a lot of work to be done before any work got done!

Finally, however, it got down to the real sculpture work, and I learned how to square a frame and how to weld a frame without having it tweak itself out of alignment. That was the barest tip of the iceberg in all the learning experiences I had with this piece, and some of them felt extremely unpleasant. I’m the wiser for it, however, and even when things seemed at their worst, even when I welded something on and then hated it and wanted to tear it off (friends said leave it alone, so I did, and they were right), I kept moving forward and the end result is nothing short of fantastic!

This piece is exactly the sort of thing I wanted to build when I first laid eyes on Eddie Boes’ “Island Exploration” video. It’s the sort of work I’ve been dying to do even when I was first learning on copper at my dining room table. I was able to push myself farther, create more, show the world more of what I am capable of building than with anything previous. And you know what? I’ve still barely scratched the surface. This one is wonderful, and I am happy and proud to have completed it, but if you think I’m going to rest on my laurels, well, you couldn’t be more wrong.

The response to this video has, in the space of hardly a week, been outstanding for me personally. Over 1,000 views already, and it hasn’t stopped! Please take a look, share it with friends and add a comment if you like. It would be a big help toward me pursuing my art and creating even grander pieces.

New Sculpture Video! It’s a Ringer.

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I am excited to report that I have recently completed a small rolling ball sculpture. This piece had several new challenges for me. For starters, it is a very small piece, measuring 6″x11.5″x6.5″. That’s not a lot of space in which to make things interesting! To accomplish that I used several pieces of scrap steel that I claimed out of the scrap heap at work. Visually, this piece has some real fun stuff going on.

Secondly, the sculpture is composed entirely of mild steel, which means it will rust if not coated with something that serves as a moisture barrier. I could have used standard paint, but that would wear away after a while where the marble rolls. Plus, regular paint just isn’t what I wanted to use, and I didn’t want it to change the color of the metal. I really wanted it to not look like it was painted! It took some internet searching, some phone calls, some driving, plus a little hit-and-miss investigation, but I feel fortunate to have found a place that was actually excited about taking on my odd little challenge to them: “See, it has this marble that rolls around, and the marble hits one part and rings. It has to keep that ring even after it has been painted.” They actually got a kick out of that whole idea, gave me a nice trial price to allow me to test their electrostatic paint process, and I’m pleased to say this thing looks fantastic! You can’t tell it has been painted, and the ring is great! Things went so well I am planning on doing a series of these pieces priced right around $175.

At any rate, I’ll let the video fill in all the blanks. Likely you are really curious to see what I’m fussing about.

Two outta three

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I spent a while setting these pieces up and getting everything to fit just right. I did a fair job at pulling it off, really. Quite pleased with that. The middle and left welds look great. The right hand one came seconds away from being a terrible failure, but it’ll hold. I almost cut the wire in half! Hey, better than when every single weld was like that. If I can turn out some more stuff like this I might stand a chance of actually getting some real sculpture built!

Well, we can’t have that

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Ugly

Less ugly

Today’s pic o’ the day brings with it – an extra pic! Woohoo! You’re welcome.

I usually try to limit it to just one picture to force myself to learn to make decisions, but today’s post simply wasn’t going to go over so hot without having a “before” shot. And, um, actually, the “before” shot is really more of a “already started, but still ugly” shot.

Shall I explain? I shall. In the top photo in the foreground you can see what looks like a pretty ugly piece of wire. In the, um, aft-ground a wire that looks kinda shiny. That wasn’t like that minutes before I shot this. All the wires looked blackened and scarred up like the foremost one. I wish I’d thought to take a picture before I started cutting things off. Pity. At any rate, there were two main wires for the track that were haphazardly connected to each other with two U-shaped pieces. They were all horrible welds, and some of the pieces were nearly cut in half rather than being welded together. It was a mess, and I didn’t think it was even going to stick together for long.

With my recent success in welding, I decided I absolutly had to fix that aberration. I picked up the bolt cutters and proceeded to remove all manner of nastiness. Then I fabricated new pieces to go in place of the dead ones. It took a total of ten welds to get everything back together, and I’m happy to say that only two of those were less than decent. Unfortunately, you can actually see one of them here (that black dot on the connecting piece is a hole), but an 80% success rate for me is ridiculously high. In short, it was a good night, a very good night indeed. I hope this streak of goodness continues, then we’ll be able to look at photos of me building stuff instead of pictures of welded spots like these.

Did I mention I wanted a punch press yesterday? I’d like one, thanks. And the vertical mill also, still want that. A lot.

Did I also mention that I was looking up geometry on line and CAD stuff and that I looked up the course requirements for a machinist? Yep, losing my mind here, folks.

Tonight I’m also going to meet with someone from my NaNo group and we’re going to go over the edits and suggestions we had for each other after swappping novels. I do still write, you know, lest that be forgotten amidst this morasse of machinery obsessiveness.

RBS weld – finally!

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Yes! At long last, a decent weld on the RBS! This single photo comprises my sum total of welding for the evening, but at least I have something nice to show for it. I butt-welded these two rods together (go ahead, laugh. “butt weld, butt weld, butt weld”) and they turned out the way I wanted them to! They’re together! They’re not all knotty and blobby and pitted! ‘Tis a Christmas miracle – or something!

Anyway, I’ve been trying to get the hang of this welding thing for quite some time, obviously, and I’ve been making mistakes right and left on the sculpture. Tonight it was a welcome moment of victory. I’d best hold on to this one. I may not have another for weeks to come. I mean, I totally hope that’s not true, but it’s possible.

On a related note, I’d like a band saw, a drill press, a punch, an arbor press, and a vertical mill. Just sayin’. I suppose I could get by without the drill press if I had the vertical mill. Don’t want to sound greedy.

Welding, more welding, and some freaking out

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weldswithfill

This is what I did last night. I spent, I don’t know, about an hour working on this stuff. It’s improving little by little. Last night was pretty good. I actually made a weld on the sculpture last night, which I only screwed up a little. Better than that, I understand how I screwed it up. This is progress from a week or two ago when I was A) screwing up, and B) not knowing how I was screwing up. Now if I can just get “A” taken care of, we’ll be rockin’ like Dokken.

I know this stuff, these endless pics of pieces of metal with blobby, rusty lines on them are repetitious and maybe boring or annoying, but it’s kind of what I’m dealing with right now. This process is really important, the progress, the improvement. It’s even more slow and tedious for me to do it than it is for you to look at one picture of it per day, but this is the part where I am right now. This is the part where, if my life were a movie, there’d be this montage of me just sitting down at the workbench. I’d put on the welding shield, and then you’d see some flashes of light from the arc, and there’d be lots of images of burnt pieces of metal being tossed on the floor. They’d use some sort of rockin’, yet inspirational background music, like Doyle Bramhall’s “Big” or something, and periodically you’d see me lift the shield and make a face as if to say, “Damn! Failed again!” and then I’d get another look that would be all determined, and I’d wipe some sweat off my brow and go back to work. Then there’d be more pictures of steel bits being thrown on the ground, but they’d start to look better, and then I’d not look so frustrated, just maybe kind of tired but pleased, and we’d be all, “Look! He’s improving! He’s toughing it out! Killer, dude!” and then there’d be some shots of me working on real pieces of sculpture, and then a date would flash at the bottom of the screen showing the passage of eleven months and sixteen days and nine hours and thirty-six minutes would pass in about 2.5 minutes, and then they’d show me standing before a finished and unbelievably awesome sculpture, wiping my brow and going, “Whew! Golly! THAT sure took a lot of work, but, boy, did my patience and persistence pay off!” and then I’d grin and give a thumbs up or something. (I’ve been looking at too many vintage ads online. My brain sounds like a 50s ad for Lucky Strikes or something – “It’s Toasted!”)

Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of a montage here, or at least not so much of one. I guess I haven’t shown you every piece of burnt metal that I really did throw on the floor, so you’ve been spared that, and there really are a ton of them on the floor. Some of them I’ve picked back up again and welded more crap onto to save money – like this piece here! It has a weld on the other side, and I just flipped it over and used it for this test.

Anyway, the first weld is sort of decent, and the second one isn’t too bad. After that they start to get kind of squashed-looking, and some holes show up and some rusty coloring. I guess it’s better than some of the stuff I was doing two weeks ago. I actually like the top weld, even though I’d get thrown out of welding class for it, but it’s good for me.

On a slightly different/sort of the same note, I am really, really, REALLY trying to make progress on this stuff, and it is damn near impossible some weeks. This past weekend I got in one hour of practice on Friday night, and that was it! One. Hour. Over the course of the entire week that adds up to one hour and ten minutes. In seven days I got to work on welding for one hour and seven minutes. It is really difficult not to obsess about how long it will take me to improve if I only get an hour and ten minutes each week. It’s hard, it’s frustrating, but what else can I do? It’s really difficult many nights to find free time for it, and that’s even while I’m currently ignoring most of the rest of the daily crap that normal people don’t ignore – stuff like folding my laundry or sorting my mail (my couch has become a mail repository for months worth of unattended mail – good thing the bills are all on auto-pay). Lots of nights I just microwave anything that’s frozen, because sometimes saving that extra twenty minutes of preparing food is the only way I can make time. (I have become a conniseur of the frozen burrito.)

I’ve employed every other time-saving method I can think of. The only thing left to do is to quit my job, and I’m not that crazy. Motivated, yes, but not crazy. I’m feeling boxed in. Stuck. This is all I want to do, and yet I have so little time to do it. There are times when I decline invitations with friends just so I can do this stuff, as it’s the only free time I have available.

The other night, Friday night, the night when I can clearly hear many people in my neighborhood partying, I was welding and looking up basic geometry on the web. Why? Because geometry is the basis for machine work, and I’m interested in doing machine work, having a mill and building nifty parts for my sculptures, fabulously ridiculously unnecessarily complicated parts for my sculptures. I had a night off from the band, and I was looking up geometry. Clearly I’m either really taken with this stuff, or I’ve sincerely lost my mind. Given that my friends and family have not started avoiding me or continually asking me if I’m sure I’m feeling well, I have to consider the sincere possibility that I have not lost my mind, but am just really enthusiastic about building metal kinetic sculpture.

Still, what’s the point? Why am I doing this? Why am I exchanging all this free time and money and energy on this stuff? Well, simply because I like it, because it’s cool, fun, nifty, awesome – all that good stuff!

And that – that feeling of “YES! AWESOME!” is scary. I mean, do you ever have a “yes” moment? One of those times where you discover something or get into something and the only word in your head is “yes?” Those yes moments, those are when you know you’re doing something that is *exactly* what you should be doing in your life. I had moments like that when I first started playing music. It was all “Yes, let’s do that! Yes, let’s find out more about this! Yes, let’s practice more! Yes, let’s buy some records, lots of records and tapes! Yes, let’s get in this band and see what happens! Yes, let’s play that basement party! Yes, let’s record with those guys! Yes, yes, yes, yes, YES!”

Here I am again, and this feels like one big “yes” moment. Nothing in my brain is telling me that anything about this is wrong for me to be doing. Aside from letting my spending get out of control, there’s nothing I could do wrong with this. It feels like a very natural thing to do.

But what the hell do you do with it? I mean, what are the practical purposes? If I want to devote so much time to it, how, uh – am I supposed to think I’m going to make a living with this or something? Really???? Have I lost my mind? I’m not at the point where I’ve just decided to throw all caution to the wind, go in to work, announce I’m quitting immediately, and saying, “I’m going to make a living as an artist!!!” Not that crazy, because I like to eat and have a house and all that, but I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve set many other things aside in life in order to pursue this. I mean, who was here when I announced that I had decided to sell my extremely cool and vintage guitar amplifier just so I could buy the welder? We do remember that, don’t we? That amp, I held onto it for YEARS not using it, but not being willing to let go of it, and suddenly it wasn’t even an issue. It was like, “Oh, I need to buy this welder…NOOOOOOOWWWWWWW!!!!!! SELL THAT FRIGGIN’ AMP AND BUY IT YESYESYESYES!!!!!”

Like that.

I don’t know what you do with these things when they come up in life. Oh, scratch that – I know one thing to do. You follow them. They’re scary, but you follow them. If they’re positive and healthy and they make your life better, then following them is the thing to do. If they make you feel better about yourself and your life, you follow them. I kind of have to follow this. It just feels too good. Yet I don’t know where it’s going, and that’s a frightening thing.

I don’t know, kids. I just don’t know what’s going on here. I’d love to see into the future on this. Until I achieve that ability (and I’ll let you know if I do), I’m just going to keep welding. And probably being kind of scared as well.

And this stuff again – keep it short

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And so it has come to this: my sum total of welding for the weekdays of this week thus far has been a solid ten minutes! Whatever. It was all I could do to put that time together for these piddly little welds, but I had to do it. I’m testing some settings and whatnot based on what the guys online are telling me to do. The two lines with the arrows written to the left are ones where I deliberately pulled the torch very far away from the work piece (very far = over 1/4″, btw), and watched to see what it would do. You can see that the weld looks funny, kinda gray, and that there are holes in it (porosity). That’s our lesson for today kids: keep a short arc length!

Thank you, and goodnight.

More welds

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I know, this is boring, but it’s what I’ve been doing! Can’t be helped. These look nice, right? This is what they should ALWAYS look like! Actually, the bead should be wider, but whatever. Point is they are clean and shiny looking, not rusty and full of holes. Problem is, at some point I’ll go to do this again, and for no reason that’s apparent to me, I’ll end up with rust-looking rows of pitted metal. *sigh* Someday I’ll figure this out. I just have to keep trying.