clamping, welding, and chet baker

LEGENDS PARK- here comes the sun

i'm trying to catch up on my blogs but this is still about work that was taking place over the summer. probably late august early september.

the big sheets of brass came in. i've never seen sheets of brass so big to be quite honest. these were the size of sheet rock. 4'x8' sheets.

so the first thing i had to do was lay out, to scale, the sun. i got big sheets of cardboard, made some quick measurements and started sketching it on. i would draw, hold it up to the bat, draw, erase, hold it up to the bat..... until i finally got it right.

a lot of time up here

a view from my drum set in my studio. sometimes i sit and play while i think about what i'm doing next. or don't think about what i'm doing next depending upon what it is i need.

after i've gotten the sun drawn to scale, i cut the shapes out, numbered them to keep them in order, and traced them onto the sheets of brass.

after all the pieces are laid out, i cut them out with the plasma cutter. an awesome piece of equipment.

Plasma cutting is a process that is used to cut steel and other metals of different thicknesses (or sometimes other materials) using a plasma torch. In this process, an inert gas (in some units, compressed air) is blown at high speed out of a nozzle; at the same time an electrical arc is formed through that gas from the nozzle to the surface being cut, turning some of that gas to plasma. The plasma is sufficiently hot to melt the metal being cut and moves sufficiently fast to blow molten metal away from the cut.

once i get these cut out i have to lay them back out and match them up and weld them back together. first i had to learn all about stacking dimes. that's basically creating a weld that when you step back, looks like a stack of dimes you've just pushed over.

my first shot. NOT a stack of dimes but a good weld all the way through and that's what you want! i can work on the cosmetics of my weld later.

a lot of hours were spent arranging, propping up, clamping down and welding to get to this point. so it'll be this, times two, the center circle times two and all the sides.

scenes from the warehouse

marks' parts