The Tacoma Police Memorial Project:


The Construction Phase:  Bronze



Silicon Bronze takes center stage on the two major elements of this Memorial.  There are approximately 100 different types of bronze available, but silicon bronze is primarily used by all fine artists due to its durability and beauty.   While bronze is often cast into objects from moulds, I prefer to work with the raw material itself.   For this project, the bronze arrived at my studio as flat sheets.  My first objective was to form this sheets into the basic triangle shapes (below).



Bronze on the work table!!
Bronze awaiting the plasma torch.


After cleaning the bronze, I gave each element it's final designation as to where it would end up and began the process of carefully marking and cutting each piece to it's final shape.   Each end needs to have a specific taper and form.


Plasma cutting bronze
The bronze is carefully cut (it's far to precious to cut wrong).




Welding the bronze
Welding in one of 200 braces needed throughout the entire sculpture.


Due to the constraints of the machinery that is able to even bend such thick bronze, there is a one foot gap that needs to be filled.  Braces are created in order to hold a consistent gap as well as act a supports to keep the bronze from warping when put under the severe heat of the welding process.  Soon, there will be pieces of bronze placed into the gap and welded into place.


Braces in Place
Bracing in place and the angle cut on one of 5 elements.                                  




With the bronze portion of the memorial courtyard piece nearing completion, it's time to focus my energy back to the primary sculpture. By far the most difficult task is to have two of the largest elements intersect each other.  This is a challenge for two reasons; First, the shear weight and bulk of each piece makes it hard to work with, and, second, the complex angles created by the triangle shapes make fit-up complicated. In order to weld them without warping the bronze, the gaps between them must be extremely small.



The first step was to get the exact angle correct.   Each end of the crossing elements had to line up perfectly so that when they were welded, they would appear as one solid piece.




All the angles are transferred and checked many times before cutting.




All of the intersecting points have been cut and one of the end pieces are being attached.







We will add more as this project continues.   Thank you very much for being interested.

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On to next page in the project.

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