I decided on my size for the lion, which will be close to the size of the originals, I decided to go with 16-1/2 x 22 on the clay model, after shrinkage it will be around 15-1/2 by 21-1/2 or thereabouts. I scaled from photos and it appears the original lions were about 17 x 24, hard to get it much closer since the only photos I’ve found were taken at an angle, but one that helped a lot was the photo of the 24 stolen lions in the police storeroom, I could see a concrete block wall the lions were leaned up against, and since the blocks are a…

Here’s what the shattered panel I posted about that had damage in the kiln looks like, there’s so many tiny fragments that I determined in about 10 minutes of trying to see if it can be repaired to some extent that it’s beyond that LOL. If it was just a few large fragments it wouldn’t be hard to piece back together, but there’s a gallon pail full of dime sized chips and fragments too that are not shown. That’s ok though since I have a mold of it, still, it would have been nice to put back together, but with the amount of fragmentation, and then that wide crack- the…

I suppose I’ve been somewhat fascinated by these lions after reading an interesting story a decade ago about the theft of 50 of these from a fifteen story 1928 Art Deco building in Detroit that had been abandoned. Now I’m toying with the idea of making a model of one. The building, known as The Lee Plaza is on the historic register. The building closed in the late 1990s and the ground floor openings were bricked up with concrete blocks to keep vandals out, but the concrete blocks didn’t last long and soon the vandals and the scrappers made their way in and destroyed the interior, ripped out the wiring…

Oops, guess that panel didn’t work well, it was completely destroyed, turned out it was the raku clay and all the other models that had been fired were a different clay. The raku clay should have been better that the other clay since it’s designed for rapid heating and cooling. Oh well, no real loss since I have a mold of it, but it was a surprise it had started cracking and breaking before the kiln was even 700 degrees.