Tag Archives: RBS

…My intentions…ooh, weird…

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Rolling Ball Sculpture - looking up

Following yesterday’s questioning of my sanity, this is the part where I go, “Oh yeah – THIS is why I like to do this!”

It was quite a process to get everything lined up and ready to weld, and then the welding itself, well, that’s still a struggle, but I believe I got things going well enough to keep all of this together for at least 24 hours, if not longer! This shot is from below, looking up at the piece. You can see the nifty bracket, right? Behold the niftiness! (Niftiness?? Niftyness…niff-tee-niss…)

Rolling Ball Sculpture

Here’s an above shot.

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Side view.

And that is our outstandingness for the weekend! Lots of work, lots of crappy welds, lots of frowning and sweating and whatever, but it’s all together! It even sort of works when you roll marbles down it. Who woulda thought??

(Bits of) my creation

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Rolling Ball Sculpture - bracket

Remember that little bracket from a few days ago? Back on the 21st? Well, it was lame, and something had to be done about that. Sure, it would have worked as a plain, flat piece of metal, something you could easily forget, never notice – but what in heaven’s name would be the point in THAT??! I had to throw a little wackiness at it, make it interesting, and after some work with a jig saw, drill, and grinder, we have the magic you see above. Fun, eh? It took a long time, but I think it was worth it. I’d love to create more stuff in this style. I *really* dig it. It reminds me of old Buck Rogers stuff, that fabulous 50s jet-age sort of feel that comic books and advertisements had. I hope more of this shows up here.

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If you’re building one of these things, once you’ve spent way too many hours making fancy little brackets just so they’ll look like fancy little brackets, you finally get to the part where you have to actually, you know, install it. This is where multiple clamps come in handy. Not the steel blocks and clamp supporting the section of 2×4, the two welding clamps at the top of said 2×4 which are delicately balancing the platform to be welded to the sculpture, and the red-handled clips with the pipe that are holding up a long arm of the ball track (not to mention the other steel block that’s holding the lower clamp). These are probably the times where I most often go, “Why do I want to do this again?”

The answer to that question is right around the corner.

Bits and pieces…and the bits and pieces

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Today is a special edition of One-Pic-A-Day where I present you with – four pictures. I do this to surprise and amaze you, not because I’m absorbed in my own project and am a detail fanatic about documenting every step. No, surely not that…

Little legs

You’ve seen a few pictures over the last several days where I was working on some boring-looking flat thing with a hole in it. Well, here’s the wrap on that whole deal, and I thought you might be curious. If not, skip on to tomorrow where there will likely be more pictures of…the same sort of thing. Good luck with that.

Anyway, above are the little legs I cut and bent that will go around the edge of the plate and hold up the guardrail that will keep the marbles corralled so they don’t go spilling all over the floor.

Blocked up

Here I have the plate flipped upside down and held securely in place with my nifty steel blocks. It helps to be positive that things aren’t going to move while you’re welding. I’m a little extreme sometimes, but at least I won’t worry. Maybe.

Woot!

Presto – we’re done! There was a lot more to it, but I apparently got really excited about how well it was going, and I didn’t shoot any pictures between adding the railing and adding the bolts and nut. Those fasteners that I welded in there will just help the marbles bang around a good bit and wander off in all sorts of unpredictable directions. Because of this bit of wackiness, the marbles will never go through the sculpture the same way twice! Unpredictability – I like it.

Don't move!

Yet again the nifty steel blocks prove their usefulness. Not only do they help hold that brace in place, but the sheer weight of the block is enough to allow me to use a rather heavy clamp to hold it upright. I’m not reassuring you that these blocks were a good thing to buy, I’m reassuring me, although if you agree, I’m cool with that.

So, now the randomizer/track splitter is all constructed and awaiting to have the brace welded to it that will attach it to the sculpture itself. Easy enough right? One would think so…

That took longer than anticipated

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The thing to really focus on here is that plate with the hole in it underneath the other crap. I guess I put the other stuff in the photo to make it look a little fancier, because, really, all that I did the entire evening was make that plate with the hole in it. I needed this piece, so I cut it off of a giant sheet of extremely rusty metal, then I smoothed off all the sides and rounded the corners, then I ground off all of the rust, then I cut the hole in it. This doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that will consume 2.5 hours, but I assure you, it is. I got done, looked at my watch, and went, “What?!” Well, there you go. I guess sometimes the simple-looking stuff takes a while.

Over, and over, and over, and over, and…

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I keep practicing. After screwing up a number of welds on the sculpture itself, I figured I’d do a test piece like this and make a zillion practice welds (okay, ten or twelve) on it and see if that helped. The reason I didn’t try to take a better picture of the welds here is because they’re pretty crappy. You get the idea, though, that I’m doing this repeatedly. It’s not pretty, but it’s necessary. This is progress. In years past I would have thrown this all out and been really disgusted, and maybe even given up on welding all together. This is the sort of thing that would have stopped me dead in my tracks, or would have kept me from just simply keeping at it for another hour or two that evening or the next day. It’s the sort of thing where I might have thrown it angrily in the trash (or on the floor), and just walked away for a week, a month, a year.

Well, I’m not overjoyed or anything, but at least I’m not setting unrealistic expectations for myself (maybe?). This is the way things are for me right now, and they will improve if I keep after it, and I’m going to keep after it!!!!

It seems so easy

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You think when you weld something that you just…weld it! Not so. What do we have here? Well, there’s a big sheet of steel on the workbench, and there are some two by fours on that, and there’s a special aluminum clamp on there, and then the standard quick-clamp holding the small “U” piece, and then at the far end is the clamp for the ground for the welder itself. Then, consider that all this stuff had to be lined up and steadied so that it wouldn’t fall or move while it was being welded. Then, of course, there’s always the chance that the weld itself is going to be lousy (in my case), and none of the aforementioned work will matter anyway.

Just…weld it. Sure!

The same, but different

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Here is a view of the sculpture that I started in my steel fabrication workshop a few weeks ago. Yep, pretty much the same sort of stuff I’ve been doing on copper, but I’ve gone a couple sizes up in marble diameter, and it’s made out of steel. This thing is physically far larger than anything I’ve tried to do with copper, which is kind of fun and kind of ridiculous. I like it!

Letting go, moving on

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So I went to my steel fabrication sculpture class this past weekend, and it was A-FRIGGIN’-MAZING!!!! OMGZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ! (There will be more pictures and explanation later, promise!)

We built stuff! We cut stuff using FIRE!!! There was an oxyacetelyne setup and a plasma cutter and a MIG welder! It was awesome! I will post pics soon as I’m able. I built about half of a rolling ball sculpture in three hours. Yes, shock and surprise there, right? A bunch of people looked at it and were like, “What…is that?” One guy in particular kept looking at it. I’m wondering if he’s not going to start thinking about building one. He had this funny look on his face, like he was really considering something.

This whole welding thing – it was just so great! My one or two meager efforts at stick welding in the garage gave me some familiarity, and the practice of soldering actually prepared me for some of processes used in welding, so I was kind of online already. But the whole thing, just – it was incredible! I have been told, and I believe it’s also in the Artist’s Way, that when you’re really tuned in, when you’re really doing what you’re supposed to be doing, you forget all about everything else around you. Time flies by and you don’t even know it. You become terrifically focused on what you’re doing.

That’s exactly what happened. I was wholly drawn in to it. On Saturday we basically learned how the shop works. On Sunday it was, “Have at it!” day, so Saturday night I went home and took the steel rods I’d bought earlier that morning and I bent them up into spirals so I could spend my time welding on Sunday and not bending stuff. I was working on it without even being there! Then when I got there I got so into my work I didn’t even realize I hadn’t taken a picture until the instructor told is it was time to start cleaning up. I was all the way into it. It was the greatest thing ever!

But what does this have to do with letting go, you ask? Moving on? Well, the experience with welding was so awesome, even the parts where I screwed up, that I’m now clearing out anything around my house that I can find that I don’t need so I can buy a welder! From the outset of this whole rolling ball sculpture exploration I’ve wanted to weld, work with steel. Actually, I still have pieces of scrap metal, old car parts, that I cut up expressly to build a sculpture with. However, I realized not long into the project that I was taking a huge bite, and not sure I could chew it. I scaled back to copper just to get my feet wet. My feet are fairly soaked now, and this welding workshop solidified my suspicions from years past: I WANT TO WELD STEEL! I NEED TO DO THIS!

I know what material I want to use: stainless steel. I know what I want to do with it: build rolling ball sculptures. I need precision and detail. For this I need a TIG welder. Well, I could get by with less, but I’m not going to hamstring my efforts by getting what *kind of* works, not when I could pool resources and get what I *know* is going to do exactly what I need it to do.

At first I was just kind of desperate, like, “Ahh! I must get one! I don’t know how!” Then I went, “Dude, you know how much they cost, and you don’t have that kind of money….damn.” Then I went, “Hey, there have got to be one or two things lying around the house that you don’t want or need anymore. Maybe you can put enough of them together to make ends meet.”

So I started looking, and I was surprised at what I found. I dug through my back hall and found a bunch of music gear that I either never use, or use so seldom that it’s probably best that I just let go of it. It’s all going on Ebay here shortly. I already put a little bass amp on there, a practice amp, and there are a couple more old tube guitar amps that are probably going to go up as well. I may have already sold one of them to a friend, sans Ebay. Cheaper for both of us!

I’m on my way. I’m letting go of all kinds of stuff that I’ve been holding onto. It’s time to turn that over into something that I can use and enjoy today. They say that the things we own can end up owning us, that we can become trapped by things, stuff. I know that in the past I haven’t sold these things because, “Well, I might want to use it someday,” or, “But what if I regret selling it a year or two or ten from now?” Well, what if a year or two or ten from now I go, “Man, I really wish I’d bought that welder ten years ago. Just think where I’d be now if I’d started back then! Why did I wait?”

If I’m not using these things, someone else should be. They were created to be used, not to sit in a dark corner. I’m putting them back out into the world where they can be enjoyed…and then I’m going to purchase something that *I* can fully enjoy today, right now!

Slingshot – Rolling Ball Sculpture Completed!

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Woohoo! Another one off the bench!

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What do ya think? Fun, huh? Everyone kept saying, “Hey, don’t you think you could maybe, like, make it go up and over? Like a loop? Can’t you do that?” And I was all like, “Yes.” And I did. It whips through the loops and then drops down into the little pocket at the end and spins for a second with the leftover energy.

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This one’s pretty fun. It has kind of a leaned back look to it, and the way the long drop launches the marble into the loops it reminded me of a slingshot. From a side angle the bottom loop-the-loop looks like wheels and the stretch up to the spiral at the top looks like what they used to call a “slingshot” dragster, but that’s just me. You’re opines may vary, and that’s totally cool with me. It’s still fun to play with.