progress report “Deer Sculpture”
A while back I found a pretty horrible mounted deer head trophy at a yard sale. It was the sort where the hoofs were used as a rifle rack. I bought it thinking that some day I would use the hoofs and antlers to make a creature of some kind. The day has finally arrived, though it still has a long way to go before its finished. I thought I would take this opportunity to share the early stages of the project here. Above is a sketch of how I imagine it will turn out, though I can already see some changes in the works.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
As with most of my sculptures, the process begins by laying out the original found elements on the floor to begin visualizing the whole piece. The main elements so far are the deer “pieces”, and outboard boat motor housing for the body, railing sections for legs, and an old slide projector head.
A patio table base is welded to an old baseball bat to form a stand. Then the mechanism is attached and the legs mounted.
For larger work like this it is more important to work out the mechanical issues before getting too involved in the aesthetics. In this case that means a gadget to make the legs “walk”
Cranks are added to the shafts to provide motion to the legs. I am finally learning to make these parts adjustable to avoid unexpected errors.
I was lucky enough to find a pair of bearing housings that will work as “shoulders” with a motor from a xerox machine. Unfortunately the shafts had to be made custom to work with the chain sprockets and bearings.
The next challenge is considerable. The creepy feet need to be attached to the legs. I wound up bending flanges from flat stock. Each one had to be done custom as each foot was slightly different, and irregularly shaped.
Then I welded the flanges to lathe-turned couplings that fit inside the leg tubes.
Finally everything is ready to test, and believe it or not it worked the first time. The mechanism will need a good deal of further adjustment to get a natural looking walking pattern, but fortunately this can be done without too much trouble. The real question is now that I have a working model do I really want to hide all this work inside a solid aluminum enclosure? Maybe it will need windows cut into it. Perhaps a wood one would be better? The trick is to stay open and let the right decision present itself.
