I made the first cast this morning from the new mold, the mold was not terribly difficult to work with but it’s very large and since the plaster shell of it is fresh it still has about 5 to 6 gallons of free water in it that has to evaporate out, meanwhile the extra weight of the water adds about 50 pounds of excess dead-weight. I still need to cast a master to store away for future use in replacing the mold, and one for a client’s order today as well. It took 4 gallons of water in two 5 gallon buckets mixed with the cast-stone to make enough slurry…

The mold was removed from the clay model last night, it was difficult to pull the rubber off since it was pretty thick/stiff in places it needed to be and a lot of undercuts and keyhole areas, the original unfired clay model mostly surviced the mold making process, only the curled tail broke off but it was a fairly clean break and it can be repaired so that eventually- I hope- when I buy a larger kiln I can try firing it. Nr 170 did not survive the mold making process but that’s ok, I have a plaster master from it and the mold. The models were all made from…

Now I will be working on building the supporting shell for the mold today. I just finished all of the required sections and at the moment I’m waiting for the last/bottom section to harden fully before taking the mold apart. I decided to do the plaster shell in the modelling studio instead of the basement because with the rubber and the board the model is around 120# and that’s a bit much to try and manhandle through three doorways and then down a narrow flight of stairs. The first picture was taken around noon, the last one around 7 PM so it’s easy to see how making ashell like this…

I started the mold for this this morning, so the progress on that is happening, the rubber portion should be finished late tonight. Now the rubber portion of the mold is completed, having used up 3 gallons of the compound. I ordered 4 gallons knowing that like the first one it would take more than the single 2 gallon kit, they run $200 each so this one model used up $300 worth but I have enough left over now to replace 1 or possibly 2 small corbel molds that needed replacements for a long time. The next step is building the complex plaster support shell for this, I figure about…

At this time I am working on setting up this model for the mold as a client has purchased a cast. This model was made along with four others in Dec 2007 but at the time only one had been molded, the other three awaiting specific paid orders to make the molds for due to the costs involved. The photo shows the model being set up, the red/brown material is a non-hardening wax/oil based clay and this design needs four so called dividing shims so the rubber mold will be able to open around these undercuts. The tail curl has a hole through it, so in order to remove the…

A client tentatively wishes to purchase a couple of at present designs that do not have molds available for them, one is one of the four Public School gargoyles and the other is the sitting winged lion after those on 90 West Street- both models completed a few years ago but never molded due to lack of any serious interest in them. These two should be available very shortly.

Just for sharing/education I thought I would describe how I usually find the scales of things from photos, which I do a lot for my sculptures. Here’s one wall of the map room in the NY Public Library, I already know it’s 34 feet wide because I found that fact in an article, so I would first look around for something of known size, if an adult person is standing there you can use a rounded out 6 feet for the scale, in this case the only known size is the width of the room. Now I want to find out the size of the corbels in that cornice or…

I was reading a number of articles on this gothic styled 60 story building which is now 100 Years old, the whole of the facade is made up of over 16 MILLION pounds of terracotta made by the Atlantic TC Co. The building’s facade has more than 400,000 units of terra cotta. Due to the lack of maintenance, the anchors attaching the terra cotta to the steel frame rusted and caused widespread damage to the terracotta panels. Many broken pieces have had to be replaced with new terracotta, or in some cases, an alternative material which these days is usually cheap fiberglass replicas or fiberglass reinforced concrete. By 1978, just…

Unfortunately only two people on my mailing list responded to the last newsletter asking for input on interest in any of the 10 or so photos of possible designs for the next model. I’m leaning a lot towards this Assyrian themed Art Deco on the 1928 Ageloff Tower building, I remember seeing this in person years ago. It measures over 9-1/2 feet wide on the building, if I did one half of it as shown by the red box and reduced it’s scale a little a 19-7/8″ x 30-3/4″ model would retain the same proportions and be a more practical size. It would be a pretty easy model to make…

I decided to stain the floor, door and wainscot to see how they look using Cabot Walnut stain, the mahogany floor looks very good in person, a bit red in the photos, but the color in person looks nice, as well as aged, the basswood doesn’t stain really evenly but gee, in the future there’s no reason I couldn’t make the wainscot out of mahogany, ditto for the stairs, the only issue would be the moldings, I’m not thrilled by the design of the Northern scale lumber’s baseboard profile I could come up with a much better one if I research what machine it could be cut on and have…