Piece By Piece

  Hey everyone it's Chris! I'm hoping all of you readers out there are doing well!   Today we worked on cutting more pieces together for the platform. As you can see in the picture, we are working on welding the vertical pieces to the base. Also, today we scheduled out when we will have [...]

We’re Taking Over

  Coming to you live here from The Shop its Adam Windham and boy do I have a treat for y'all. I am a little late on this blog post so I'm going to try and make it up to our readers with a little something special,... I've got a video for you. Click on [...]

Back to the Grind

Another week began -and moved us closer to our deadline- as we got back to work on Monday. We are ready to send off our steel plates and beam to the water jet, so that our holes and threaded studs will line up accurately. We (the Queen of the band-saw, Minji) have cut our 6x6 [...]

O.C.D.

Obsessive Compulsive Design I have been stressing lately to the students to stay organized.  We are at a critical moment in the construction process where we are making many pieces, some small and some large that all need to go together perfectly.  Not only do we need to make sure things are made correctly, but [...]

Is it Square?

As Jeff mentioned in his prior post, the steel has arrived! We began studio today with a quick run down of how the band saw works as well as how to go about cutting our steel tubes and plates. Once the tutorial was finished, we eagerly began cutting. The steel itself is not a very [...]

The Steel Cometh

Greetings all!  The steel which constitutes our main structure has arrived and is patiently waiting in the  yard to be cut.  The arrival of the steel was not without drama with the truck driver backing into the gate of the shop.  But the steel was offloaded without any further problems.  Though I have always known that steel [...]

Making A Whole

"A Whole" Making a project into a "whole" takes a few major ingredients: inspiration, a plan, dirty hands and a willingness to learn. Making a group of individuals into "a whole" takes more...a lot of intangibles that I can not begin to name. In the beginning, we were a group of individuals designing for a [...]

The aesthetic of flame, welding

"Welding is a fabrication or sculptural process that joins materials, usually metals or thermoplastics, by causing coalescence. This is often done by melting the workpieces and adding a filler material to form a pool of molten material (the weld pool) that cools to become a strong joint, with pressure sometimes used in conjunction with heat, [...]

Decisions, Decisions

Tomorrow we have a meeting the Charleston's Design Review Committee.  We need this review to go well, or else we will not be able to build our outdoor window attraction.  We've made a lot of changes since our last iteration, many of which have to do with cost.  We want the structure to be durable [...]

Continuing Education

One of the most inspiring aspects of working on new and different projects each semester is that the design and construction solutions are vastly different from site to site and project to project. That being said, each semester we seem to find ourselves experimenting with materials new to me, which typically leads to us using [...]