Okay, so today I'll publish a little progress report on my classes. Today's class - sculpture with Margo Sawyer.
Our assignment (the second of the semester's three) is pretty straightforward: revise and extend your first sculpture project, only this time make extensive, in fact primary, use of steel as your medium. This was actually less of a stretch for me than for some other students, because a great deal of my first project had been done in steel, so rather than simply try to duplicate my previous work in a different size or multiple iterations or make it more complex or whatever, I decided to use the principles I was working with from the beginning and take them in a more ambitious direction. So, for this to be made as clear as I can make it, I should backtrack to that first assignment.
The first assignment we were given by Margot was to create a piece of sculpture using some kind of 'system' (a remarkably vague word, I thought, and probably deliberately so) as an inspiration and theoretical basis. I chose anatomy, in particular skeletons and muscles as my system. My idea was to rig up a gear and lever arrangement that would cause an 'elbow' to flex. I built the arm's skeleton out of two lengths of steel rod joined by a hinge, which I made myself from square tube, rod, and a tap-and-die process. The steel rod 'bones' were attached to the handmade hinge by bent wire for strength and epoxy for steadiness. The coop duh grays however, was the arrangement I came up with to simulate muscle. I wanted two springs that would compress and stretch in opposition, just as a bicep and tricep do, and I wanted them to take their impetus for movement from the same source. In other words, I wanted a single motion on the part of the viewer (this was to be an interactive as well as mechanical sculpture) to create two opposite forces. To accomplish this, I hit on the idea of using a pair of rags for the springs. When a cloth is twisted, its length becomes progressively sorter until the torsion of the curling fabric begins to force it into looped shapes, further reducing the overall length of the cloth. You've probably seen this when wringing out wet washcloths, or in some similar activity. My stroke of genius was, if you twist two rags in opposite directions, and rig them to turn in the same direction, one will be reduced in length at the same time the other increases. Attach them to opposite sides of the 'elbow' hinge described above, and voila! You have a mechanism that will bend and straighten the joint. Now, this didn't come off entirely successfully. I used a bicycle chain and gears to accomplish the simultaneous rotation, but didn't center the gears properly and didn't place the chain under sufficient tension, so it had a bad habit of coming loose when cranked. Furthermore, the screw-eyes I used to attach the twisted cloths to the gears were not attached securely enough to torque the cloth, but rather the tension of the cloth threatened to unscrew the screw-eye from it's moorings. Nevertheless, I learned a lot about working with mechanical systems and what kind of force different joining methods can withstand.
So, I applied my new knowledge to my current project, due for critique in about a week and a half (Nov. 11.) For this piece, I kept the idea of using twisted cloth as a mechanical force but discarded the notion of manipulating any kind of lever with it. Instead, I want to use the tension of the cloth to distort the shape of a piece of sheet metal. This may seem at first blush to be a difficult task, but I feel certain the cloth is up to it. For one thing, the piece of sheet I wish to bend is quite thin and therefore flimsy - it's only 26 gauge thickness. For another, I'm not going to have to worry about loose moorings for my gears this time. I've welded (or will weld soon) every component into parts that will move as one. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The first step was to build a frame. This I made out of 3/4 inch square steel tube in the dimensions 16 inches by 16 inches by 24 inches. Attached to one of the 16x16 faces is a crossbar of 1 inch square steel tube. I welded all of this together with an oxyacetylene torch It is quite strong, easily supporting my weight (about 230 lbs.) Next, I drilled 9/32 inch holes in center of the crossbar and in the centers of the 16 inch steel tubes on the face opposite it. Then I took a 36 inch length of 3/8 16 threaded rod and cut it into four 7 inch and one 8 inch lengths. These I bored out on the inside end with a 9/64 bit to accommodate the screw-eyes. Finally (so far) I tap and died a thread into the holes drilled in the square steel tubing to match the threaded rod. I also have 3.25 inch long rods ready to weld to outside ends of the 3/8 inch threaded rod, to act as handles. All that remains to be done is to weld the handles and screw-eyes to the twisting rods, attach the screw eyes to the cloths, attach the cloths to the sheetmetal (I have a set of bolts ready for this purpose), and begin turning those handles!
I'll let you know how it goes.
Our assignment (the second of the semester's three) is pretty straightforward: revise and extend your first sculpture project, only this time make extensive, in fact primary, use of steel as your medium. This was actually less of a stretch for me than for some other students, because a great deal of my first project had been done in steel, so rather than simply try to duplicate my previous work in a different size or multiple iterations or make it more complex or whatever, I decided to use the principles I was working with from the beginning and take them in a more ambitious direction. So, for this to be made as clear as I can make it, I should backtrack to that first assignment.
The first assignment we were given by Margot was to create a piece of sculpture using some kind of 'system' (a remarkably vague word, I thought, and probably deliberately so) as an inspiration and theoretical basis. I chose anatomy, in particular skeletons and muscles as my system. My idea was to rig up a gear and lever arrangement that would cause an 'elbow' to flex. I built the arm's skeleton out of two lengths of steel rod joined by a hinge, which I made myself from square tube, rod, and a tap-and-die process. The steel rod 'bones' were attached to the handmade hinge by bent wire for strength and epoxy for steadiness. The coop duh grays however, was the arrangement I came up with to simulate muscle. I wanted two springs that would compress and stretch in opposition, just as a bicep and tricep do, and I wanted them to take their impetus for movement from the same source. In other words, I wanted a single motion on the part of the viewer (this was to be an interactive as well as mechanical sculpture) to create two opposite forces. To accomplish this, I hit on the idea of using a pair of rags for the springs. When a cloth is twisted, its length becomes progressively sorter until the torsion of the curling fabric begins to force it into looped shapes, further reducing the overall length of the cloth. You've probably seen this when wringing out wet washcloths, or in some similar activity. My stroke of genius was, if you twist two rags in opposite directions, and rig them to turn in the same direction, one will be reduced in length at the same time the other increases. Attach them to opposite sides of the 'elbow' hinge described above, and voila! You have a mechanism that will bend and straighten the joint. Now, this didn't come off entirely successfully. I used a bicycle chain and gears to accomplish the simultaneous rotation, but didn't center the gears properly and didn't place the chain under sufficient tension, so it had a bad habit of coming loose when cranked. Furthermore, the screw-eyes I used to attach the twisted cloths to the gears were not attached securely enough to torque the cloth, but rather the tension of the cloth threatened to unscrew the screw-eye from it's moorings. Nevertheless, I learned a lot about working with mechanical systems and what kind of force different joining methods can withstand.
So, I applied my new knowledge to my current project, due for critique in about a week and a half (Nov. 11.) For this piece, I kept the idea of using twisted cloth as a mechanical force but discarded the notion of manipulating any kind of lever with it. Instead, I want to use the tension of the cloth to distort the shape of a piece of sheet metal. This may seem at first blush to be a difficult task, but I feel certain the cloth is up to it. For one thing, the piece of sheet I wish to bend is quite thin and therefore flimsy - it's only 26 gauge thickness. For another, I'm not going to have to worry about loose moorings for my gears this time. I've welded (or will weld soon) every component into parts that will move as one. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The first step was to build a frame. This I made out of 3/4 inch square steel tube in the dimensions 16 inches by 16 inches by 24 inches. Attached to one of the 16x16 faces is a crossbar of 1 inch square steel tube. I welded all of this together with an oxyacetylene torch It is quite strong, easily supporting my weight (about 230 lbs.) Next, I drilled 9/32 inch holes in center of the crossbar and in the centers of the 16 inch steel tubes on the face opposite it. Then I took a 36 inch length of 3/8 16 threaded rod and cut it into four 7 inch and one 8 inch lengths. These I bored out on the inside end with a 9/64 bit to accommodate the screw-eyes. Finally (so far) I tap and died a thread into the holes drilled in the square steel tubing to match the threaded rod. I also have 3.25 inch long rods ready to weld to outside ends of the 3/8 inch threaded rod, to act as handles. All that remains to be done is to weld the handles and screw-eyes to the twisting rods, attach the screw eyes to the cloths, attach the cloths to the sheetmetal (I have a set of bolts ready for this purpose), and begin turning those handles!
I'll let you know how it goes.
posted by Austin at 1:51 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home