Busy, busy

It's been very busy for me the last 4 days. I got the heads all made for the stone. We also got the various texture coats on the sculpture as well.

Due to the various washes and glazes, there was a fair amount of dry time before we could start the next steps. The whole thing looks great! You almost have to see it in person to see all the little texture elements that would be in carved stone. Finally today we were able to wrap up the sculpture as done. Which is good, as tomorrow is the delivery date I promised.

JO

wrapping up the texture

I got to the shop at 7 am this morning ready to start the texturing of the sculpture! I tend to get excited about most of the jobs that come through our shop, and if I didn't need sleep, I would just work all the time. I know that if I won the lottery, I would still make all the stuff we do! Anyways, I was able to parge all the moldings with Durabond and add a sand coat to the rough stone base. This actually takes quite a bit longer than one would think. As I was waiting for the Durabond to stiffen up, I worked on the 2 heads at the top of the sculpture. I was able to find a 3d scan of a stone cherub head online. The nice thing about this 3d model is that it has "baby proportions" You know, that chubby face. This works great with our sculpture, as all the figures that were carved in that time were all kind of chubby. I brought the scanned model into our 3d modeller "Hexagon" and added that weird smurf hat that Mithras seemed to wear.

 After the modelling was done, I brought the model into Aspire and split it right down the middle and toolpathed both sides. The machining was a lot quicker than I thought it was going to be......40 minutes to rough and finish machine both sides of BOTH heads with a 1/4" ballnose cutter with a 6% stepover. A pretty small stepover for what this is, but it means no sanding! Being that we cut these out of HDU foam, I wouldn't really need a roughing pass, as the material cuts like butter. However, the flute length on the cutter(the spiral part of the cutter that removes the material) was only 1"  and our foam was 2"  I quickly glued the halves together and texture coated them with what was left from doing the main sculpture.

After that, I moved on to drawing up the simple bases that the heads sit on. As I was machining these parts, The storm we were having knocked out the power, leaving our Techno cnc very, very quite and alone in the dark. This really stinks because I wanted to leave the whole thing done, to dry overnight. Oh well, I will just finish up in the morning. This however sets the painting back a bit, but it'll get done.

JO

Greek Gods, Vectric, and my sweet, sweet Techno cnc router

Sometimes things go really quickly! As the Techno cnc was running the 3 reliefs for the Mythraic stone sculpture, I was quickly drawing up the top and bottom moldings that wrap the sculpture. This again was done completely in our Aspire software. It was a pretty simple task for sure. I opened the reference picture and traced the left and right molding profiles. As the reference image was taken at an angle, perspective comes into play, making one side of the molding smaller than the other. After tracing the left and right sides, I morphed them into an average size and went with that. Off to the 2 rail sweep tool for the next part. Having the cross section now, I just needed to "sweep" it along 2 straight vectors. Done. Next I used the same profile to cut the ends, this eliminates the need to mitre the corners. So essentially the front and back molding have the profile on each end, and the side moldings are just cut square, and fit right in between.

Our Techno cnc did a great job at efficiently cutting all the pieces. To mill all 3 reliefs 21"X31"  (at an incredibly small 6% step-over) and mill all 8 moldings, the time was just under 7 hours. The relief has a lot of vertical edges in it, so this can exponentially slow the machine down. This is due to the X and Y axis having to completely stop and wait for the Z axis (the up and down movement) to get to the height it needs to, before continuing on its way. It's like trying to get to 100 km/hr in you driveway! This being said, I couldn't do it by hand in that time. AND I can do other things while the machine is running. Like stare at it in amazement most of the time!

By the end of the day, I had all the parts cut and glued together. I'll let the glue set up overnight tonight, and start with the coating tomorrow. While I am busy with the coating process, the Techno cnc will be machining the 2 small head sculptures that adorn the left and right sides at the top. I will probably cut these from 15lb HDU foam, as they need to have some detail to them, and I don't really want to coat them with Durabond.

JO