Mondays always seem to be the craziest in our shop. Today was no exception. Four large pieces arrived back from the galvanizers. The boys almost finished the welding on the he second half of the first Viking ship making it almost ready for disassembly. The second Viking ship got it's upper keel welded into place making that piece as large as the first. The sail fabric arrived from the printer today necessitating a trip to our sewing supplier to assemble the pieces. And the shop was emptied of the painted features in preparation for the loading of the shipping container on Wednesday morning. The driveway is full for most of it's entire length with pieces is various stages. Tomorrow we'll sort all that out.
How time flies!
We built Giggle Ridge more than a decade and a half ago. A few years later our first grand daughter came along and spent a lot of time up there. Each summer Phoebe and I still regularly visit the park, mostly riding the rides these day, much to Phoebe's delight. Today, was the first such adventure of this season. We paused the excitement of the rides to take a picture on the little truck photo opportunity which we created so long ago. The truck has magically gotten much smaller of late!
Building the bones
Inside each of our features is a welded steel armature that keeps everything stable as we build, transport and install. This welded steel structure needs to be strong and can't flex in any way or the concrete skin around it would crack or crumble. When the components we are building need to fit together it gets even more complicated and there's a necessity for tight tolerances. Our MultiCam CNC plasma cutter helps a whole lot but there is still plenty of hand fitting, welding and grinding to get things right. We are currently working on the last two (of six) keel ends for the final Viking ship. There are approximately sixty pieces of steel welded into each keel, plus the pencil rod to hold on the mesh and concrete.
