Friday, April 13, 2012

Duluth Public Art Progress, 13 April

Making good progress on the project. We are being extra careful on the mold making and adding insurance in the form of sand molds over our ceramic shell. This adds perhaps another hour per mold but insures we don't have to start from scratch if a mold fails.


Final 3 sections of the legs, all the debris in the background is waste. But if one of our shell molds were to fail we would not only have 30 pounds of molten bronze on the floor we would have to start the wax process over. The sand mold is insurance to prevent this from happening.

Make shift blower. To dry the shell cores (inside the mold). I found a sleep apnea pressure device that blows a gentle 8 cfm, split the pipe and put ends into mold. Works great!

Arms right out of the molds

Body section, because these are so big we are coating one side at a time. To prevent the wax from spreading out from the weight of the mold material screws are set next to the wax, blocks are underneath.

We will be casting body sections early next week and assembling of the casting will start right after that. By next weekend I should have the female figure pieced together, can't wait!