Blog on...

It's been a while.

The gates have been on hold whilst more groundworks were done around the house.
And this has been my excuse for not writing.

Most recently my time since last has been filled with turning, this...

Into this...

This very cute 50's / 60's Piaggio Ape is becoming a coffee stall, and will be sprayed in it's new 'Romo Coffee' livery. Inside the back is a catering grade stainless steel deck with a small integrated sink.
I'll add more pictures once it's all been re sprayed and is up and running.


Now back to the gates...

One result of the groundworks is that the ground level is a metre higher than originally thought and, so they are in proportion to the wall, the gates can't be as high.

So I chopped a strip off of the bottom.

And made a coffee table out of it.

It's been in an exhibition and I'm currently trying to find an appropriate shop to put it in. All suggestions welcome.


Til next time.

4. bending metal

well, it had to happen eventually...

not quite as eventually as it's taken me to post this, my apologies.   this has been due to a problem with the computer.

anyway back to bending metal.

i am not a blacksmith.  blacksmiths have a forge, heat metal til it's red hot, then bend it as if it were wire and hammer it into finely wrought shapes.

in some ways it would suit these gates if i were.

however, i am not a blacksmith.   these gates will be made by bending the metal (mild steel) cold.   it's a case of levering it into shape around pre-made jigs or more frequently for me, between two sturdily fixed uprights.

it's all about the leverage, and the longer the metal, the more leverage you can get.

starting with the thickest stuff, 20mm x 20mm solid bar, i managed after a few days of too-ing and fro-ing to get them pretty much spot on with the floor painting.

it does your back in though...

then the thinner stuff.   i decided i had to weld some of the sections together as the loose pieces were getting kicked around underfoot.   who on earth thought it'd be a good idea to do this on the floor...

i was happily surprised at how graphic it looks.    and pleased for that that i am not a blacksmith (not that i've anything against them, in fact some of my best friends...)

til next time...

3. a metalphor?

all hold on bending metal.

an emergency ladder is needed...

more correctly, a library ladder is needed urgently.   me old mate, lovely dave, a carpenter of some distinction, is making a four metre high bookcase that needs a ladder.   it must be light, elegant and unobtrusive, and run on a track attached to the top.   he concluded it would look too chunky made in wood.

he came into the workshop to take some samples of the sections of steel i'd use just to make sure the clients were happy with what they'd be getting.   i got the go ahead a few hours later.

to keep the structure light it was to be made of thin steel tube sections: the treads cut from a 30 x 20 rectangle section and the long uprights from a rather fetching D section.   these particular shapes and sizes are only available from one supplier in the uk and not wanting to bore you with the whole story, suffice it to say i very nearly fell out with them in trying to get it.

anyway, following the palaver of getting the specific section of steel in, in time, i set about fabricating the ladder.

as you can see the only available space to make a four metre long ladder was on the floor...

ladder made, i set about making a system for the top to be on wheels to run in a track.   again i won't go into the ins and outs of it, but it took a few attempts and a couple of days to get right.

finally, exact height of the bookcase double checked, angle of the ladder defined and bottom cut, filled and ground down to sit squarely on the floor; the steel was cleaned and patinated, all set to go.

my concern was that the height would be wrong, i'd made some adjustment possible, but still...

but it fit...  perfectly.   so it was waxed and installed.

... and the clients hate it.

so if anyone's interested in a light, elegant, beautifully made four metre library ladder that took nearly a week of my time to get right, nearly cost me a useful steel supplier and ate into my gate deadline, please let me know.

til next time...

2. painting the town red...

... well, the floor... purpley grey.
and white.

this week was all about getting the design onto the floor.   this was so i had a true size template, something to shape the metal to.

these gates are to sit between the side of the house and a wall, possibly a boundary wall, certainly it's an edge to the garden.   and there's a path, let's call it a garden path, that runs through them.
now, the last time i'd been to the site there was the side of the house and the foundations for the wall separated by 2.7 metres of mud.

i was due to go back to the house to install a balustrade that was to be fitted in mid january.   an ideal opportunity to check on progress, see if there's a scent of a path, refine the gate design...
however, in the way these things go, they've not yet got the stone on the stairs, so i'm still waiting for that ideal opportunity.

it's probably worth pointing out that i'm based in london, a hundred odd miles from the site in the cotswolds.   my guess was that if i took time out to visit i'd just be travelling to see the same 2.7 metres of mud.

needing to get on with work it seemed best to paint the design on the floor as one continuous panel (good for the flow of lines aswell) and then slice sections out for the posts and gate frames later.   the other advantage with this is that if it turns out to be a narrow path double gates won't look right and i'll be able to change it without too much hassle.

the original sketch was printed out with a grid on with 31 points along the bottom, each representing 100 mm so that i'd end up with 3.1 metres of panel, well you never know...

having drawn the grid on the floor of the workshop i started painting.

purpley grey because there was a nearly full tin in adam's cupboard and he didn't think he needed it.   (wish i'd nicked it to paint the doors at home - it's lovely).   adam, by the way, is whose workshop i share.

the white was to correct mistakes and sharpen the lines to give a better idea of their true thickness when they became metal.

there are more pictures but the changes are fairly slight so i'll cut to the chase and just add the last one.   in the end i changed some bits i didn't like and tried to make it make more sense organically.   i wanted to be sure i knew where each end / curl started from, so there wasn't an end just going to another end.   (two ends don't make a...)
as to why such things might be important to me, that'll be covered in the as yet unwritten 'making mental work' blog.   (the amount of people that think i'm a mental worker when i tell them what i do...)

anyway, this is the new floor of the workshop.

it'll change as i get down to making it and i'm still not entirely sure about some bits, but now i need to start bending metal.

til next time...

1. the commission...

i was given, just before christmas last, a very open commission for a pair of gates into a garden.
"we're not sure exactly what we want, something lovely... that'll keep deer out."

we agreed a rough budget and that it should last for a good number of years.

a dream commission even.

these garden gates are to be to the side of an extraordinary house being built to a design by palladio, something that was never actually built at the time and that he, we can surely presume, never envisioned in the cotswolds.

something lovely... where do you begin?
i looked at the sort of metalwork that accompanied palladio's buildings;  i thought of cool, post modern twists;  i pondered on the meaning of lovely;  i even toyed with deer scaring imagery...
animal traps and hunting rifles began to sour the dream.

then one of my brothers pointed out, in the straight thinking genius way he has, that it was the perfect opportunity to make the sort of thing i'd always wanted to, or at the very least it was a good place to start.

... well obviously...  i'd have thought of that in the end...  probably sooner than in the end, actually...



for years i've been filling sketchbooks with doodle like squiggles, swirly shapes i thought would be paintings or something one day.*   i'd more recently began to wonder if they could be made in metal, i am supposedly a metalworker...

anyway, a few late nights later i ended up with this.

it isn't in fact that much like the doodles.
it is though what i presented to the client and was given the deposit for just before christmas.

since then i've been gearing up to make them, this isn't quite as flakey as it maybe sounds.
i bought an english wheel which i'll explain another time... it shapes metal, will do for now.   i also made some of the sort of shapes and lines i want to use, basically trying to ascertain how i'm going to do it.   i have found in the past that i get halfway through making something before realising how i should've done it at the start but then not being able to change now because i'm already halfway through and it'll look odd if one end is done differently...   so, i've been mucking about a bit getting the hang of the lingo.

this became a shelf bracket that i've decided to get a couple of casts of.   two being the usual number required to support shelving, and me having taken long enough to do the one...

if anyone's interested i'll happily cast more to order but they ain't going to come out cheap.   must remember to do smaller stuff...

(*re-reading this i suspect it conjours up an image of a bookshelf sagging under the weight of a huge, varied archive of work.   to reset this somewhat closer to reality it should more accurately read, it's taken me years to fill a few sketchbooks with...)


so, the next thing is to draw the gates to scale on the floor so i've something to work from.

til next time...