Titanium sculpture

[Burnt hands]

Here is a 6Al-4V titanium sculpture I recently finished. The top is 24" in diameter and is attached to the base with a 1 1/4" X 7 bolt so it can be taken apart for moving. The only non-titanium parts are the three 1/2" x 13 stainless bolts holding the top to the base.
I could have welded the two pieces together but decided not to in case I wanted to use the base for another project in the future.

The hardest part was welding the inside joints. Had to leave a couple of openings in the top so I could reach inside to complete the welds. Then I filled in the holes. Luckily I could fit my tig torch thru the pieces to get inside.

Used four 336 cu ft tanks of argon to finish this project as I set post-flow time to 20 seconds for each weld.

Base appears to be some aviation related part as I see heat discoloration.
Piece weighs 80 lbs so I could probably get a good price for scrap value alone.
Probably have more money in tig wire than the scrap pieces.

[chrisgay@sbcglo]

Cool piece, Burnt Hands.
Looks like fun.

Did you find those top pieces as drop/scrap material?
I'm not an airplane guy, but it would be interesting to know what that cast bell-housing was for.

Thanks for sharing.

[k zen]

Hi Guys

Nice Sculpture , The Cast Bell Housing Is The Center Of The Brake Assembly That Holds The Multi Disk Pads And The Rotor On The Main Landing Gear Of Big Aircraft.

I Am Working For Air Canada

Bobby

[chrisgay@sbcglo]

Hi Guys

Nice Sculpture , The Cast Bell Housing Is The Center Of The Brake Assembly That Holds The Multi Disk Pads And The Rotor On The Main Landing Gear Of Big Aircraft.

I Am Working For Air Canada

Bobby

Thanks Bobby. Those must be some serious brakes. What are they making the rotors and pads out of these days?

[JimYoung]

Nice job, thanks for sharing..
Jim

[fun4now]

verry cool.
where did you get all the pices ??

[StillBoostin]

verry cool.
where did you get all the pices ??

They call that SALT. LOL

That is one cool sculpture. How much does it weight?

James

[Burnt hands]

Hello all,

I had collected these drops and scraps over the years from sellers on ebay and a local scrap yard whose owner has sadly ( for me, but happily for him) retired.

They sat collecting dust and crying out for a use until I saw a photo of a stainless steel globe sculpture. It had round bars for the latitude and longitude lines and the countries were cut out of plate and welded to the framework.

Finally had a design but one problem was figuring out a way to assemble the pieces into a hollow shell.

The answer came when I went to a friends house for a cook-out and saw he was using a Weber round charcoal grill.

So I bought the 22" model and used the base as a form to hold the scraps while I welded them together. Made 2 hemispheres then joined them together.

Top weighs 52 lbs and the bolt and base weigh 28 for total of 80 lbs.

Took about 75 hours over a 5 week period to complete.

Bobby, thank you for letting me know what the base is from. This was a mystery to me.

Here is a smaller titanium sculpture I'm sure everyone will recognize. The base plate is 6 7/8" diam x 1/4" to give you a sense of size. The fun part was looking on the internet for information on the dimensions of the actual place so I could make my sculpture proportional.

Thanks for the nice comments.

[fun4now]

cool, nice lil model.

[Craig in Denver]

Weber Grill!! I wondered how you got that thing so round.