If you’ve been following along with the blog for the past week, you know that we are staying busy in the shop between studio work, Metanoia’s Reynolds Avenue Homecoming, and our Introduction to Craft (ITC) projects. If you’re just tuning in now, here’s a recap:
While we wait for permiting and zoning to get approved on site, we are making steady progress on our prefab elements for the build. The CNC’d movable wooden wall partitions are almost all cut out; we’re still missing the thermally modified wood but once that gets cut, we will be all systems go to assemble the wooden walls.
On the metal shop side of things, the large vertical trellises are nearing completion as the frames and grids have all been welded together. Now we are working hard to weave our “sweetgrass” metal rods into the grids. If you were wondering how easy it is to weave rebar through metal grids, it’s harder than it looks. Yesterday and today are all hands on deck to get those trellises woven and welded up. Our goal is to get those completed and out of the shop by the time that the Metanoia/Reynolds Ave Homecoming builds really get going.
While the team was working up a sweat weaving the rods, Matt finished CNC’ing our comb jig for the overhead trellis. The comb acts as a jig to ensure that our steel bars for the overhead trellis are at the correct spacing and angle to the end bars. This is important since our pavillion is curved, meaning that our overhead trellis are also angled. It’s more or less like pie. With the comb completed, we began setting up the steel bars to be welded. The full-scale mockup for our overhead trellis is on a critical timeline since we may ask Robert Thomas (steel design firm) to lasercut us a permanent steel comb to help stabilize the metal trellis. Today we are making a second, simpler jig to ensure that the two comb jigs are square with one another. The overhead trellis mockup is our priority task to complete today.
The end is in sight for the metalworking portion of the project! Once we get the green light on our overhead trellis mockup, we can begin cutting the rest of the steel bars to length and make the other four overhead trellises. After all of the metal work is done, all of the pieces are off to get powder coated and meet us back on site three weeks later. Since I headed up all things metalwork for the project, it will definitely be a relief when they are all done and ready to be installed!
On the Metanoia/ITC side of things, we received all of the materials for our homecoming builds yesterday. Tomorrow during ITC, the shop will get even more crowded as those builds get underway. We have a quick turnaround time since the homecoming is next weekend (11/7). For context, if you are just now joining us in the blog-o-sphere, our ITC class (which is all of the same people that are in the A+CB studio) is teaming up with the undergraduate studio to “design engineer” and fabricate their designs for Metanoia’s Reynolds Avenue Homecoming exhibition. There are four teams/hubs, each with a different build serving a different purpose within the exhibition. Our studio was broken up into teams and paired up with the undergrad teams. While the Hub 4 team eagerly worked over the weekend on their build, the rest of us begin building tomorrow. Stay tuned for updates on that!
That’s all for now. Staying busy and working hard. If you need any of us, we’re probably in the shop!