Monday 5 August 2013

Sculpture's Head

I sweated the scalp on to the head of the sculpture but it looked too big and square, so I took it off again and lowered the front of the head above the brow by about 3-4 mm and made a new scalp. To solder it on I cleaned, fluxed and tinned the two mating surfaces using old lead/tin solder.. (the lead free solder is crap and has caused nightmares for the electronics industry. I did hear that the whole justification for lead free was based on some faulty arithmetic, but don't really know). You can see from the pic, I held it in position using my special gravity clamp (or hammer as it's sometimes called) while I heated it with a fine blow torch.
In the interest of exactitude, the picture of sweating on the scalp is from the fist time I did it, you can see the line of face and top of head is about 90 degrees and V square. The second attempt has a more rounded scalp and and more obtuse angle with the face.



The head still looks a bit bulky but that's the odd thing with a flat cut out style of construction. Things can look too skinny or too wide from different angles. Once he has his second pair of arms at the full draw position his shoulders will be more solid looking.

You can see I've also jogged his neck now.

The 'Beauty and the beast' pic (bottom right) shows a little try out piece I did, a lady archer with a crown which I did for one of the girls at the Tudor re-enactment who'd had a go with the Hazel bow. She'd worn a funny felt crown with a squeaker in it at the Mad Hatter's hog roast afterwards which was rather fetching and comical, so I couldn't resist making her a little momento.

Damn...
I'm making the bow for the low hands position from the thin copper sheet as it isn't the main position, more a shadow of where the bow was before full draw.
Anyhow, I'd hammered it to work harden it and got it straight and slim, then it dropped off the work bench and stuck in my toe just behind the nail!
The perils of wearing sandals.
You wouldn't think something so small would do any damage, but the tips are quite sharp and it fell straight down like an arrow... errr bow...err whatever... it smarted and drew a surprising amount of blood. Rather amusing, toe skewered by copper bow!

No comments:

Post a Comment