Putting pieces together

After a nice long holiday in London, Paris and Cardiff, I returned and went right to work KW-ing before settling into my studio to finish my piece for the LSE. This is the base it will go on at Wisconsin and Mohawk .


These last few days have kept me quite busy. Logistics, needing to be stronger, have more hands and needing more hours in the day all were opportunities I have encountered the last few days. In addition to the fact that flatbed trailers are hard to come by in this town.


Anyway, I put Position together in two main piece and then put those two pieces together. The picture above shows what I had completed before I left for London. And to the left shows the bottom, that I signed, just in case someone in the future wants to know my name, the date and the name of the piece.


I am supposed to install the piece 5.6.09 and I am nearly ready to rock, but Mother Nature may have something else in mind. I do a lot of stupid things, but hanging out with an 8' steel sculpture in a thunder and lightning storm hopefully isn't one of them.

Building "Position"

Last week I spent in the studio cleaning and grinding the steel rings for "Position." The edges of the rings were cut with a torch making for a very rough edge. I had to grind them down to achieve a cleaner looking edge.

I also cleaned the surface of the steel with a wire cup brush attached to my grinder. This prepares the surface to accept the primer and paint later on.

It's a little hard to see in these photos, but on the left is the before and on the right is the after.

After I finished these six rings, I started to weld the pieces together. I finished the top two and bottom two rings.

Below is an action shot of me welding the bottom two together. I am only welding on the inside of the rings, so you see a nice clean edge on the outside. The welding is the fun part...much easier on the wrists!

website and rings

So, I finally bought my domain name for my website. { www.dustyfolwarczny.com } Feel free to click on it. I am still very much in the process of building it, so try not to judge too harshly. I thought I would be frugal and use Google apps or sites rather than purchase Dreamweaver and it is proving to try my patience. I'll get there soon enough, though.

More than half the time I spend on my mac trying to figure the program out, I'm thinking in the back of my head that I would much rather be working with the metal and the other projects I have going on. BUT to move forward, I have to look ahead and remember that the administrative stuff is just as important in terms of business.

However, all next week I will be spending in my studio. I was able to make a trip to Victor Pipe & Steel over the weekend to procure steel rings for the piece. I now have six of the seven rings needed to complete the piece at my studio. I'll fetch the last one when I return to St. Louis for Easter. Thanks to big brother for hauling two of the rings up here for me :)

I have to get Position built. I will need to install it on 5.6-7.2009. I have a lot of grinding to do before welding the rings together. I am still uncertain about how I will fasten the sculpture to the base. I need to know where it is going before I engineer that part (there are many different locations around Chicago it could end up). Most likely I will use a flange or an inner ring to secure it to the base. I'm sure that makes very little sense without a drawing, sorry...I'm just a stream of consciousness right now. Back to work!

planning, specs, procurement etc

This is picture of what I gave to Victor Pipe & Steel to help them visualize what I needed to complete the sculpture "Position" for the Lakefront Sculpture Exhibit. The engineers there will be cutting the rings for the project this week. There was a piece of .25" scrap plate that will be recycled into sculpture.

I just received my contract and and finishing it up today to send into them all i's dotted and t's crossed! I will be set to install on May 6th or 7th. I'm really excited to be able to continue working on "Position" this spring and great to be part of something in Chicago. It's one more stepping stone!

genius

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/453