A New Life At The Aquarium!

We worked fairly late on Friday to get the last of the shark wrapped up. We're not hard-coating, or painting this guy. The hard coat will be done by another shop, then he'll head out for his spanky new paint job!

The head kinda had it's own thing going on. It needed to be as hollow as we could get it. There will be a speaker placed into the roof of it's mouth so he can speak, and the back of the head will get a filling hatch cut to re-load the machine with stuffing. This was accomplished mostly in Aspire, by cutting out as much of the inside as possible, but the head file had to be sliced accordingly to allow for this.

Until the head was finished, I had Jody stand behind the shark all day as a head stand in! It probably would have been funnier to have her stand IN the shark :)

 The head was assembled, and glued on as a final piece. The bottom jaw going on as the very last piece.

I nested the teeth together in Hexagon, and added a network of .250" rods that served as tabs during the machining. I toolpathed this file in Cut 3d, as it almost completely automates the double sided machining process. I especially appreciate the over-cut feature!

the last step was gluing the teeth into the mouth. When I sliced the teeth off the mouth in the computer, I left a little stub of the teeth in the gums. This made for quick locating all the teeth during gluing.

The shark got installed today at Ripley's Aquarium, and the paint job looks great. With the hardcoat on, you could hit this with a baseball bat, and it wouldn't leave dent!

A quick job that came out great! My kinda jobs!
8)
JWO

Styrofoam Sharks, and Shop Safety!

Before I post about the Ripleys Hockey Shark build, I thought I would post a short video on Shop Safety. Normally I don't post random things from the internet, but this video is somewhat related to what we do, and the 'Pro Safety Tips' never go out of date.

Before you watch the video, it is important to note that they asked a kid to teach his brother about shop safety, adults acted the story, and they overdubbed the kids voices back on.

So here's a little humor for your day:

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We had a last minute emergency Monday night! The art director for the Christmas Horror Story called Monday evening, around 10pm, asking if we could fabricate one more rigid crosier for Tuesday midday. So Jody and I headed back to the shop to cast and paint one up. We didn't get home again until 2 am, but at least we got to sleep in a little before delivering it to the City. I do believe it was shooting that evening!

 

It really became a matter of waiting for our Techno cnc to finish the parts, then glue them up. This left me with the time between pieces, to clean up the seams as I went.

Because this whole thing will get around 3/16" of urethane hardcoat, a-lot of the detail was simplified, like the laces on the skates. I purposefully left out the bow, that the laces would be tied into, for just this reason.

On some of the layers I made the decision to just machine one side. If the transition wasn't complicated, it was faster to quickly shape it with 80 grit sandpaper, than to flip the foam sheet on the cnc, and machine the back side.

We should have it all cut and ready to send to hardcoat by end of day tomorrow! Providing there's no late night crosier developments in our future!

 

And remember, always wear gloves when you do softly tips with the hammer!

8)

JWO

What do sharks do in the winter?

They play hockey!!! Or at least the Canadian ones do!

This is the second shark for Ripley's Aquariums that we're doing. This will dispense the stuffing that goes into the 'Build a bear' stuffed animals that you get to build yourself. The good news for us is that I only have to bend the flipper, and add skates. The rest of the model was re-purposed from the first shark we did.

The cnc-ing went pretty fast. I toolpathed the whole thing with a 1/2" ballnose cutter, and was very careful to confine all of my strategies to just the parts that needed cutting.
About half the files need double sided machining, so this is critical to save as much time as possible!

 We only got a few layers done today, but I think we're off to a great start!
8)
JWO