Tag Archives: RBS

Woody wood wood

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I was so exhausted Monday that I only took three pictures all day, and two of them were of this right here. I went up to mom and dad’s to say hello. Ended up hanging out with dad and we talked about some wood for some rolling ball sculpture projects I have going on (okay, they’ll be going on sometime kind of soon…I hope). So we went through his scraps and found some nice stuff. Should look when it’s done. For now, well, it’s just pieces of wood, I guess. I just couldn’t make anything else happen tonight, went home and almost immediately went to bed.

Smoothing Things Over

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And, following on yesterday’s post, here we have pop giving me a hand with the rolling ball sculpture project. I wanted to put a wood base underneath it so that it would be a little easier for the kids to pick up and move and possibly not quite so likely that they’d grab onto the frame itself and bend it. (I hope, anyway.) Plus, it eliminates the possibility of the bare wire scratching any tabletops.

I asked dad if he had any scrap, and my only desire was that it not be plywood, because the sandwiched nature of that wood looks unattractive when viewed from the edge, which this would show. Pop leads me over the the scrap box and says, “Well, here’s what I have – some pine…here’s some mahogany if that’ll work…” and he has real wood! I grabbed this kind of streaky-looking piece and said, “What’s this?”

“Oh, that’s some spalted maple a fella gave me. Most of it was too water damaged and I had to throw it out.”
It was awesome looking, but an extremely rough cut.
“Sure. I can plane it or maybe sand it.”

So here’s dad doing some sanding on the piece after we got it cut down to size. Turns out it’s going to need some planing, as it’s just too rough for the sander to do an adequate job, but it’s going to be awesome. Spalted maple has all these black lines in the grain where water got in and discolored it. It’s a very unique look. Can’t wait to show it to you guys when it’s finished!

Roll ’em

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Did I say I was finished with this? I think I did…the other day. Maybe? Silly me. I can never stop improving something. In this photo there’s one improvement that’s readily viewable, and that’s the little leg there at the lower right corner. You can even see I haven’t soldered it in place yet. I removed the simple spiraled curl that had previously been the terminus of the whole shebang, and I added a ramp to that last spiral and had it curve around to the lower right there. Nice, eh? Makes it a lot easier for little kids to get at the marbles and put them back up top for another trip.

Next up is to have dad help me make a nice wood base for it.

Another Senseless Machine – Sweet!

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I do so love these. Anyone who has been hanging around here for a while knows that I love these things. Rolling ball sculptures. They’re pointless. You put a marble at the top, and it rolls down to the bottom. It doesn’t accomplish anything useful, not in that “We have work to do! Money must be made! Mountains must be leveled! Paper must be shredded!” However, they’re just friggin’ fun as all get out.

I haven’t done a lot of work with these lately. Seems like RBS building and reading have taken a back seat recently. I afforded time for this one a few weeks ago, however, during the Masterpiece in a Day event, which, I just realized, I never did fully devote an entry to, so you’ve not seen this thing until now! My apologies. I’m sure you were all chomping at the bit.

Any rate, here it is! It looks a little different than it did on the day of the event. I spent the evening tweaking it. I recurved the legs so that they sweep in toward the base more. This makes it look a little more groovy, plus the base I’m going to make for it will be able to be cut smaller. I also fixed one major support issue. When I first built it the thing was very wobbly. After looking at it for a while and playing with it, I realized it would benefit from one support piece in a strategic place. I made one up and installed it. You can’t even really see it in this photo, but it reaches from the bottom of the first spiral down to the very beginning of the third spiral.

What really surprised me was just how much of a difference this made. I mean, I knew it would help, but had no idea how much! It stands about as solid as any frame of copper could possibly do, even better than I could have planned. I should have been an engineer, you know it? Friggin’ architect. Look at that thing!

Well, it’s base-makin’ time for this bad boy. Since I basically threw it together in six hours, and it’s missing a lot of the refinements of one of my usual pieces, this one is going straight to my 3-year-old nephew. He’ll think it’s cool, and I won’t lay awake at night wondering what someone will think of it.

What a Tool

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Doubtless you’ll be as breathless and excited over this one as I am. These three seemingly inoccuous blocks of aluminum have tremendous potential, at least they do for me. They’re tools to be used in the making of rolling ball sculpture. These were designed by the sculptor Matthew Gaulden, and constructed in conjunction with his machinist. These hold 1/8″ wire when building an RBS, and Matt says they cut down his construction time by 20%. Building these sorts of sculptures is very time-consuming, so any way to cut down some of that is welcome, particularly when it’s an annoying detail like getting track spacing consistent. Personally, I’d rather spend my time developing some new track element, like a lift that’s shaped like a ferris wheel or something. Track spacing? Not exactly my idea of ultimate creativity.

One side note here: They don’t make copper in 1/8″ diameter. These clamps are to be used with steel wire. This means they have to be welded isntead of soldered. Previously, everything I’ve done has been soldered copper. I have a crappy little welder with which I have cobbled together one or two things. This is effectively a move toward making some construction changes. I don’t know when you’re all going to see some results, but it occurred to me that sitting around thinking about how I didn’t know how to weld my sculptures was not getting me any closer to being able to weld. This, this is a step forward. Stay tuned here for details on how I manage to botch my welding in the future.

Tina Hard at Work

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Tina is working away on the base for my latest RBS. She’s done a bit o’ blogging on it, and I thought you might like to see what she’s got on her plate right now. This is a lot more involved than I’d originally imagined it would be. I appreciate that she’s working so hard at it.

Here from earlier: http://tinahanagan.com/2009/04/08/rbs-progress/

And here from just this week: http://tinahanagan.com/2009/04/13/its-all-about-the-circles/

I had fun decorating Easter eggs with the fam over the recent weekend, and hope to have some pics up for that as well as the Dyngus Day gig I did down in Bloomington, Indiana with some band friends – much hilarity in costuming on that one!

Stay creative, folks.

Metallic return

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Finally.  FINALLY!  I’m working on sculpture again.  It’s not much, but it’s more progress than I’ve made, more work than I’ve been able to do, in over a month, and, man, does it ever feel good!  I’m coming up from the basement with sooty black marks in random places on my face, and my fingers look slightly blackened and they smell like metal.  Life is good.

This is the top gear for my chain lift.  Getting things to line up and track properly could prove to be a challenge that will have me cursing and swearing on future blogs, but I trust you’ll all get a big kick out of that anyway.  The chain is called ladder chain.  I found it on the web.  The gear is out of a windup clock, because I thought the gears that you could buy to fit the chain perfectly were ugly, being plain black plastic.  This is way more hip.  It will likely be the source of much cursing (aforementioned), but you can’t tell me that it looks unbelievably boss.  The bracket holding the whole mess is a cut up and bent harmonica reed plate.  I think I found that one in the kitchen, or maybe the bathroom…or maybe…it was on my dresser.  I don’t know.  It’s serving a better purpose now.

I hope to have more RBS niftiness to blog about as the weeks go by, but progress on these things can be slow.  Tonight I found out that I need to get the shaft for the lower gear turned down at one end, and I don’t own a machine that can do that.  Kind of a problem.  We’ll see how I figure that out.  Much of the immediate work will be getting the lift positioned and mounted properly.  It’s not the most interesting work, but there’s no way around it.  I’m just happy to have my hands on metal once again.