Tag Archives: spirals

Roll ’em

Posted on by
2
.

.

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!

Posted on by
5
.

.

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.

Accomplishment!

Posted on by
7

Oh, the weekend I had, kids! It was all set to be a bang-up, creative-filled weekend, and by golly if I didn’t just shoot the moon on that one!

The big ingredient in all of this madness was the lack of gigs this weekend. Usually the band plays both nights, if not just a Saturday. It’s not often I get two nights off on a weekend. In addition, I also had very few personal obligations this weekend. No one was getting married, baptized, bailed out, or otherwise taking part in some sort of activity that demanded my presence for very long. Well, someone had a birthday, and I showed for that, but it was for a (still very young!) old friend. Good times and merriment were had.

But back to the other merriment, my merriment. With the weekend free of gigs, I spent most of Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday afternoon hunched over my workbench in the basement, floodlights ablaze, brow furrowed in concentration, and I made stuff. Pliers, wire, torch, solder, flux, wood, Dremel – I was a dynamo, I tell you! A friggin’ dynamo! You want proof? No problem!

View from the top.

View from the top.

Apparently, I got going so quickly that I never took pictures of just two spirals mounted, or maybe I did and offloaded them from my camera really quickly, I can’t recall. But here we are, already looking far more complete than a week ago. I think this photo is from Saturday evening. I have the second spiral mounted as well as the third. At the bottom you can just see the final wire with a little flux on it. I was getting close to adding the fourth spiral and realized I’d not stopped for a photo.
Side shot.

Side shot.

To the left here is a side view of the same. You get a good idea of the vertical spacing here. The most work involved is getting the exit ramps and entrance ramps all tweaked and worked out and smooth in transition. I easily spend the bulk of my time getting the track to leave the bottom of the spiral smoothly and move on to the next one without incident or drama.
Another top shot with four spirals mounted.

Another top shot with four spirals mounted.

Here’s a nice top view of four spirals mounted up. I think the third and fourth spirals went fairly easily…well, no, maybe they didn’t, but going from the second to the third wasn’t any piece of cake either. The exit from spiral three was a real bear. Lots of tweaking was involved. I have to say, though, that I was putting together some fine solder joints on all this work. It was slightly incredible, if I do say so myself. It took an entire other sculpture worth of work, but I think I’m getting the hang of this soldering thing finally.
Top three-quarter view. Nice waterfall effect here.

Top three-quarter view. Nice waterfall effect here.

Here’s a three-quarter view on the left giving a sense of the flowing path the marble will have – or at least I like to hope. The switchback effect from the second spiral to the third comes from the fact that spiral number two rotates counterclockwise, while all the other spirals go clockwise. I thought this would be clever and fun when I did it, but after I started assembling the whole thing I realized just how much harder it made things by switching the direction of the entrance and exit ramps. Yes, oh-so-clever me. I made it work, but it required a lot of figuring and scowling. I would do the same sort of thing again, but I think it would work better on a larger sculpture where I had more room to manipulate the changes in track direction.

Soaring high with four elements attached!

Spock's martini glass is starting to look less like a martini and more just plain...groovy.

And here we have the final results for Sunday evening. I think we’re getting the martini glass effect again on this one. I’m not sure about that whole initial ramp I made for the first spiral, but there you go. Seemed like a fine idea at the time. I’m not quite sure why there’s such a sharp drop between spiral two and three, but I think it has something to do with me not quite knowing how to design the exit ramp appropriately at that time. On this project I’ve learned a ton about spiral exits. They still take a lot of work, but I’m learning how to get them to exit in the direction I want rather than just letting them go wherever they seem to want to go. I’ve yet to figure out how to bend one exactly right from the outset, and since these things never end up going together the way I think they are in my little paper scribblings, it kind of doesn’t matter.
We’re getting close to the end, kids! I was doing bends and tweaks on the final spiral last night before I shut the lights out. With that and the exit ramp to build I’m guessing it may take me another week to get it done. Then…well, then it still won’t be done, because my friend Tina Hanagan is going to design a base for it! I’m very excited about this. Very. I think it will add a lot to the finished design, besides the fact that I think her work is really cool anyway.


With that in mind, I think it’s interesting to note that I’ve just recently found out that another friend of mine is doing lampwork – glass bead making. She tells me she might be able to make some custom marbles for me. Yeah, I know, you’re all just as giddy over this news as I am! We’ll see how that little wrinkle turns out.


Genevieve reminded me that I need to post whatever music I was listening to at the time. This blog’s auditory inspirations: The soundtrack to “Dusk Till Dawn,” and Dar Williams “End of the Summer.”
Until next post, kids, stay creative!

It will stand!

Posted on by
6

My brother and I were going to work on the Chevelle on Sunday, but by 2pm I hadn’t heard anything from him. I figured that, since I’d wanted to get some sculpture done, I might as well get started on it while I waited for him to call or come over. This turned out to be my greatest and wisest decision of the day.

My previous sculpting session had netted me with some design plans and three curved pieces of wire. I could have posted that the other day, but it was pretty unimpressive-looking, even though doing the work took me over an hour. As I mentioned previously, sometimes real progress doesn’t look like much.

So I sat down with my three pieces of wire which were to form the frame, and I thought about what I wanted to do. About all I knew was that I needed them to form a sort of tripod. Oh, and that the ends of each piece were to be curved in small spirals themselves (I do believe a theme is developing here, no?). Seeing as how I couldn’t assemble the frame without the pieces being curved first, I went to work on those. I used a piece of small pipe for the “big end,” and a small screw driver shaft to form the “small end.” After initial work, I had this:

The photo above shows the main supports along with a rough drawing depicting the top and side view of what I’m going after with this one. The top coils are yet to be modified into spirals at this point.

Above you can see the results of working the top coils into spiral shapes. Once that was done I brought the pieces together into a standing configuration. This took a bit of doing. At first I thought I was going to have to build a wooden frame to mount and position each piece. That would have obviously eaten up a lot of time, and I didn’t want to get that involved. Instead I took a stab at lining everything up by eye, and I’ll be hanged if it didn’t kind of work! I was completely amazed that I was able to get these pieces even remotely even/straight/aligned without a miniature scaffolding and sixteen extra sets of hands. Actually, that one pair of vice grips to the right performed amazingly well, and I thank it for its assistance.

The one thing I hate about lining stuff up is, once you have it all positioned and you’re sure you can really do it the way you wanted to do it, you have to take it all apart and prep the pieces to solder them, and then put it all back together all over again. This I do not like to do, and so after I got the pieces positioned and became exalted over the relative ease with which they came together, I stared at it for a little while, simply not wanting to take it apart…and then I took it apart.

Surprisingly, amazingly, and fantastically, when I got all this stuff lined up and positioned and put the torch to it, I only bumped it out of alignment one time. And when I bumped it that one time, I was unbelievably able to get it nudged back into place within seconds. Truly, angels and things otherwordly and and awesome were at work here, because that s*** just never goes my way! I got pretty darn lucky, though, and after a few tense moments was rewarded with this not-too-perfect-looking bit of solder work. It could be better, and I wish it were, but I got a good, solid joint, and that’s the important thing. This photo is before I washed and scrubbed it, so it looks a tad better now.

Here’s the finished effort! It stands alone after only four hours of work! (Well, it did after I took the clamps off, I assure you.) Not bad, kids, not bad. I honestly cannot believe that I got all of that stuff lined up and soldered using a pair of vice grips and two Third Hand clamps. Really, I’ve spent hours doing seemingly far simpler tasks and been rewarded with endless frustration. This was gold, gold I tell you! (Of course, right after I decided to knock off for the day I wished I’d gotten even more done. Never satisfied, I tell ya.)

The next step is to start hanging spirals. I realized immediately that adding elements to this might necessitate heating up that initial joint which I’d just made, and this freaks me out. Sometimes that stuff just falls apart again if it gets too warm. This could be a really big challenge, one that I’d not foreseen. Hopefully I’ll find a way around it. It’s looking nice so far, and it’s been fun. I hope it doesn’t turn into a nightmare. (Nightmares are great in movies and all, but they kind of suck at a workbench.)

On a related note, after I went to the doctor this morning (nothing serious, just annoying), I got some coffee in the building’s coffee shop. Dig the glass wall sculpture in the background! However, my main focus as I sat there waiting for my latte was these stands that they had for their lamps. The metal which comprised them was about as big around as my thumb. The night before I’d been fighting with a pair of needle-nose pliers to bend .10-inch copper into little spirals. I just looked at this thing and went, “Wow, must have been some big pliers.”

Sculpture Soundtrack: She and Him – Volume Four

Twistin’ the Night Away

Posted on by
3

Well, it wasn’t the whole night, but it felt like it constituted the bulk of my activity for last evening, so there ya go.

I told myself once again that I was going to dedicate one hour of my evening to doing sculpture.  This program seems to be producing results, so I’m sticking with it.  Yestereve (it’s not a word, but, eh…) I had gotten two coils bent and gotten most of one spiral formed.  Last night it was dauntingly simple: make more spirals.  The plain simple obviousness of what needs to be done, the real work rather than the planning or figuring or talking about it feels intimidating, but I went back to the prayers from the day before, and I was on my way.

After only an hour of work I had this:

Woohoo!  Sweet!  Five spirals of varying sizes.  They look nifty, don’t they?  I think they turned out quite nicely, if I do say so my humble self.  I tested a marble on all of them, and it looks like they’ll serve pretty well just the way they are, although some minor tweaking will likely result during the rest of the build.  The exit ramps are a bit touchy for me as well, but I’ll have time to fuss with that later.

It’s incredibly satsifying to be able to crank out some complete sections like this in one sitting.  A lot of RBS building involves gradually piecing together sections over a period of time, sections and elements that can’t be tested or used until a certain point is reached.  It can feel like no progress is being made.  Last night it was easy to see the progress in my work.  I value those moments.  Perhaps I’ll come back and read this entry some time when I’m knee-deep in soldering together support braces or some similarly necessary yet time-sucking and not so fun task.

My big issue now is I’m not sure how to integrate the spirals as a whole.  I’ve come up with a couple of different ideas, but not I’m not married to one or the other just yet.  They kind of look like little flower blooms, don’t they?  Hmmm…  Stay tuned, it’s getting interesting!