So I give Jen the sculpture this morning.  Much giddiness ensues.  I am happy.  Jen is happy.  I also let her borrow the two Marbles of the Day that I brought in today.  She already has three at her desk.  A few minutes later I hear the sound of marbles falling all over the place, and I go, “That really didn’t seem to take care of the problem, did it?”

She calls over the cube wall, “I was trying to…I made all five fit!”

Me: “?”

I look over the wall.  Here’s what she’s done:

Sweet!  I had no idea, clue, plan like this when I built the sculptur last night.  I wish I’d thought of it!  I am constantly being given the opportunity to learn from others.  I’m really kind of surprised that this worked out the way it did.  I was so tired last night I was just trying to finish it without destroying it or burning the house down!  This is further evidence of something I’ve heard many times before, and which Diablo Cody mentioned in an interview a while back, “People always bring a bit of themselves to art.”  No matter what an artist does to try and evoke a specific emotion or reaction, people are going to bring their own experiences, believes, their own selves to a work.  I think this is a pretty fun little example of that truth.

Apparently, when I decide I’m not going to do a lot of work on the sculpture on a Thursday night, what that means is that I’m going to instead do a lot of work on a little tiny sculpture for the heck of it.

This was supposed to take fifteen or maybe thirty minutes. I’m not going to look at the clock, but I’m guessing it took an hour or even two. I’ll be kicking myself for the exhaustion tomorrow come 2pm. However, it will be immeasurably cool to bring this in to work and plunk it on the desk of my coworker, Jen. She is always supportive of my creative efforts, which started out as her bugging me to write horror stories for her to read. She pretty much sparked me into doing the first short story I’d done in a looong time. Now she always asked me about the sculpture, if I got anything done, what it’s going to be like, asking me to show pieces of it to her. I now have made it a habit to bring in two marbles every day from that six pound order I made a few weeks ago, ’cause she likes to check ’em out, and it sort of keeps me inspired with a larger goal in mind.

I gave her a couple in the beginning, and usually I hand the two I bring every day over the cube wall to her, and sometimes she ends up leaving them sit at her keyboard all day, at least when she’s not accidentally knocking them off and sending them rolling across the desktop.

So, yesterday when she knocked them off again I said, “I’m going to have to do something to fix that.” I don’t even think she knew I was addressing the rollage occurring on her desk, but I decided to finally give her a little “thank you” sculpture.

Thanks, Jen!

Two updates in two days – craziness!  For me it’s still the same day, just a few hours later.  Any rate, I worked on the RBS some more tonight, and got a nice little bit of work done.  I fabbed up a new little short piece of track and got it all soldered and everything without any drama at all.  Nice.

This piece is the very first section of track that the marbles will ride on when they come off the lift (spoiler alert: there’s going to be a lift!).  No doubt, since you are all so eagle-eyed and whatnot, you’re saying to yourself, “Yo, those cross piece thingies are NOT like the ones on that first section Tom built.”  Right you are!  For the heck of it I decided to try using sections of copper tubing cut in half.  Look kind of neat, don’t they?  Originally, this idea was posted on the Yahoo RBS group as a time saver.  What I’ve found, however, is that it seems to take a lot longer to do this than to just bend a bit of wire and face off the ends flat.  Go figure.  Since these were sitting around I figured I’d use ’em and see what they looked like.  This means, of course, that my sculpture will look funky and mismatched to some degree, but I’m going off the deep end and allowing myself to make some that’s not absolutely 100% perfect and uniform (*GASP!*).  Letting myself do this is actually a really good exercise, as in the past I’ve allowed my efforts to be stalled or completely stopped when something wasn’t perfect.  By giving myself permission to try different things without worrying about every single tiny detail I free me up to make a lot more progress.  Since this piece got done in one evening, I’d say it’s a good indication that it’s not a bad practice in which to indulge.

In addition, I have a nice little surprise.  I was talking with a friend on the phone this evening, and she said, “I can’t wait to see what it’s like when it’s done.”  Well, me neither, but I have a little diagram I drew that at least tells me what to expect, and you do not.  Therefore, I am going to share said diagram with you, my little internet buddies, so that we can all follow along and anticipate the awesomeness as it unfolds.

Behold, my grand plans:

Stunning, isn’t it?  I’m sure this is crystal clear to you. If not, don’t worry.  I’ll be sure to provide plenty of details along the way to explain just exactly how this drawing will wildly diverge from/become the RBS titled “Turtle.”  (I’ll explain that one later.)

I’m tired, kids.  Time to put the lights out on a very productive eve.  ‘night!

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.

Matthew Gaulden RBS

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.

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!