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.