Alex: An Exploration: December 2007

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Climbing the Space Needle

It was a difficult task, 525ft from the ground, the 7th tallest structure in Seattle, but I did it, I climbed to the top of the Space Needle. How you ask? Why? what the hell was I doing there in the first place? and did I get arrested? these are all good questions, I think the last question shouldn't raise a brow, but that's not important right now. I was working, tearing down Ice Sculptures when the service elevator shut down, leaving all my supplies trapped and me stuck in the basement, some lady with more clearance than me swiped her card to the stairway and told me it was 3 floors up, no problem. Of course the skycity floor was locked and the basement door then locked me in, I thought maybe I didn't go up high enough to reach the skycity floor. 80 flights of stairs later in the esophagus of the Space Needle, the wind blowing hard and my legs pumping battery acid I came to the top floor with a card reader key entrance. I tried my card and got a green light, but of course the alarms when off. one of the employees was standing there asking me what was going on, still out of breath I managed to explain. everyone was really nice about it, a waiter even brought me a glass of water. we all had a good laugh, but the embarrasing part was I had to take the regular elevator down with a full load of people watching me sweat and all i could think about was if the room was spinning (which it does) or if it was my head. turns out they moved all my crap out of the elevator and put it by my truck, they practically did my job for me while I ran around trying to figure out what was going on.

Friday, December 14, 2007

My First Sculpture!

My first sculpture! The drill bit used for the details of this Christmas tree was $500 and the surgery to remove it from my clavicle was only $10,000! what a deal! if you don't pay attention to what you are doing, those things can jump and get away from you, or in you.

it does take patience and a lot of concentration to handle this drill

You can see in the background the variety of tools we use in this craft, ancient Japanese secret! specially made chisels, something like 15 chisels with different angles, some for round edges some for sharp edges etc, giant saws (with teeth the size of my thumbs!) specially made drill bits (6-8 drills in all with different bits all custom made. All very very expensive, and all very very sharp.

the colored logos are the coolest, its just a gelatin paint mix that we freeze into the drill holes. this one we tilted the block and let the red run down first and then let the orange bleed from the top into the red and make and red flame kind of appearance.

And vawla!

today at work we received a bucket load of buckets (we use them for draining the excess water when the sculptures are on display) we usually get them from hotels or restaurants and they are usually all different sizes, meaning when we get them we have to spend an hour taking them apart often times throwing away some that we had to drill holes into to brake the vacuum. Steve was showing me plans for his new invention that uses leverage and an aluminum plate to rip them apart, in the mean time however we used a pair of pliers and the plate... is was about just as hard to rip them apart than with just your fingers, but on the bright side it didn't hurt as much. today however I had about 30 buckets, about halfway through (and an hour later) I stopped and thought to myself, the vacuum is what is making this hard, you cant fight that with brute force! so I used my brain. about an hour later my brain hurt, but I had an idea, use the air compressor to shoot air down the sides and break the vacuum! the rest of the buckets came apart in just 2 minutes with a satisfyingly "POP"! Steve was amazed, I saved a lot of time (well at least for next time) and energy. productivity is up, and so Steve is happy.