Making sparks

With a change in direction to the next project there are a lot of projects in the fabrication stage in the shop currently. The plasma cutter is going steady and plenty of sparks flying from the welders. I'm busy doing the primary frame on the next feature, Peter on the second level of the first feature while Shane also works on other pieces. We still aren't revealing the details of the projects but we can share pictures of progress to date. The first picture shows the not so little creature I am working on...  It's going to have four legs, two arms and is robotic.  More details to come tomorrow... 

Shane polished off the inside of the frame for the tree. He is building a lot of character as he does all that overhead welding of the hundreds of feet of pencil rod. Now we move on to the outside shapes.

With one of our welding machines currently out for repairs it was time to purchase a new one, leaving the oldest to be on standby when it comes back from being fixed. The shiny new welding machine arrived today and we decided it would be Shane's machine - right out of the box. It was love at first sight.  :)

This stump's bark is far better than it's bite

Today was an extremely good day for bark. Yesterday's rapid progress continued today with the application of the lower section of fibreglass reinforced concrete and it's sculpting into bark. We experimented with some small sections before settling on a new technique which worked out extremely well. This stump's bark is far better than it's bite!

Instant progress

It's kind of funny how certain steps in our building process seem to go so very quick. We design, measure up, figure out, cut and weld for the longest time. Then the lath is painstakingly applied and carefully checked. Then it is sculpting day and a whole lot seems to get accomplished in a big hurry. The truth is we work diligently every single day and are productive too. Some things just take a little longer while other steps seem to be very visual and go in a hurry.

The large piece for the PNE was largely transparent until today. With the application and the sculpting of a large portion of the surface the piece changed very dramatically in a relatively short time. Tomorrow, we'll do the gnarly bark on the bottom of the tree stump and 'in an instant' the feature will progress once more.