I've been working on nothing other than this hand for most of this week. I usually do one or two hours of design in Vellum and Sketchup in the morning, and then crank all day in the shop. The main reason I'm going so hard is that I am trying to get some momentum going on this thing before things get crazy for me this spring. I just learned that I'll be attending the Maker Faire in San Mateo in May, and I have a possible TV show brewing too which might take me away from Taos for lots of time if it ends up happening.... so you can see why I am cramming in the welding hours now, while I have them.

The Sketchup model is progressing. I try to stay a few steps ahead of actual fabrication with the digital model, so I can be sure of what I am doing before I start butchering steel. One thing you may notice in this image (besides the obvious fact that I've drawn most of the Hand) is that I reversed the arcs in the forward outriggers, so they now look like the rear ones. I did that because I felt that the outriggers, in their first design, took too much visual attention away from the Hand itself. The ability to view the whole sculpture in 3D digitally before building, which alerted me to this issue, has proved to be an outstanding advantage to working with Sketchup.

I spent all day today making the forward outriggers. Here you can see the arced top-member, which I arced by making lots of cuts ALMOST all the way through, and then pulling the material together, closing all the cuts, and then welding them closed.

I finished one forward outrigger. Well, almost finished... there's more stuff that will happen in the future, but it's finished for now.

I'm beat, so now I'm gonna watch LOST and fall asleep.

Ciao.