2024-06-14 (V. van der Wijk)

After some months of hard work my new interactive 8 meters high balanced stainless sculpture Timeless is ready for exposition. Here some photos of the production. The two long pillars with rectangular cross section I built from lasercutted plates of stainless steel which you can see assembled here, just before welding them together. 

At the top of each pillar I implemented a 1:47 belt transmission in three stages to the thick output shaft. This was quite complicated to make and was meant to be able to drive the sculpture by rotating a crank handle near the ground 47 times to have the sculpture move around once. This way of interacting with the sculpture, however, I found not satisfactory. Yet the transmission showed to function excellently for generating extra inertia to smoothen and slowing down the motion of the sculpture, enhancing its beautiful motion.

Here the top of the pillar is being closed by bending the inner plate of stainless steel into the curved shape and fixing it by welding.

All the edges had to be filled by welding and subsequenly they were grinded to obtain flat surfaces with nice straight edges. 

The long moving beams and the parallellograms I manufactured from rectangular tubes that I grinded as well to give them the same very shiny appearance as the pillars.

This is the first assembly of one of the two moving parallellograms...

...and this is one of the two output shafts being made in the lathe:

Setting up a new large sculpture for the first time is always very exciting. We first placed the two pillars on the concrete base and aligned them properly. Then we attached the two long beams at the top of the pillars by bringing them up a ladder.

Finally the parallelograms were installed on each side of the long beams, completing the sculpture. The very first thing I always like to test immediately: does the balance look good? Only after the sculpture has been finished this can be checked and fortunately, the balance turned out to be extremely good here, as you can see also from the video: