"George Beal Auto" Project

A good friend of ours owns a garage where he does auto repair. His old plywood sign was so bad after years and years of hanging in the weather that George took it down. He asked us if we would be interested in making him a new sign. So we did and it sorta exceeded even our expectations!

I laid out the design and cut it with our Samson table. It took one full 5 x 10 sheet of 14 gauge. Once it was cut and test fit together, we took it to our local vo-tech school, Somerset County Technology Center, to see if the auto-body shop would be interested in doing the painting. We wanted the sign to have a nice automotive finish and figured it would be a great project for the kids at the school.

My son took this class and we had become good friends with Jim Shesko the instructor. He really liked the sign and was happy to take on the project. A local company that builds fire trucks donated the red paint. Get this, the red paint takes 24 hours to dry at 100 degrees! Boy does it look nice.

Ok, now the special project…. George has been a good family friend for many many years. We decided to do something special for George and when I found the 57 chevy file here on plasmaspider ( http://www.plasmaspider.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=665&p=1544&hilit=57+chevy#p1544 ) I knew what we would make him!

Once cut, I asked Jim Shesko was more than willing to take a stab at custom painting the 57. And I have to tell you folks, everyone that has seen this piece has been stunned. Here they are....

Memorial Angel

This Angel was made to commemorate the memory of a family's young son who passed away after a battle with cancer.


The angel is made of 3/16th steel and is 6’+ tall and approx 4’ wide. It was hand ground to add a slight texture and then powder coated with a satin clear finish. The lantern with the turtle and flowers were torch colored.

The memorial resides in a garden courtyard at a Somerset PA church.

Southwind Community

This sign was created in the fall of 2006 for a townhouse community being built at Seven Spring Resort in Seven Springs, PA. As you can see the community was named Southwind, a ski in ski out community.

The sign is made from three pieces and is cut from ¼ inch hardened aluminum. It is anchored to the rock with approximately ten ½ inch aluminum rods that were imbedded into the rock.

The finish is actually sign vinyl and a shadow has been added which gives the sign a 3d effect.

Cabin Railing - A big challenge!

In the late summer of 2006 we were commissioned to create our first full railing. As you can see the railing is panel inserts in a log railing. This was by far the trickiest job we had done at the time.

The logs were slotted in all four logs top, bottom and sides. There were a total of eight panels. The slots were just over 1/8th inch wide and around a ½ inch deep. As you can imagine that sounds pretty straight forward, but consider that no two logs are the same and they are not uniform from end to end.

We took measurements and then went home and cut the panels. Then we went back to the site and removed all the top logs so we could test fit the panels. Once they were all in place the top logs were screwed back in place. We marked all the visible corners, front and back of each panel. The client wanted to have around a 1 inch border around the scene in each panel.

We then disassembled the whole railing and took our fitted blank panels home to have the scenes cut into them. The photos in this blog entry are the end result, an eight panel continuous scene from the bottom of the steps to the end of the loft. Design, fitting, cutting and refitting was about 2 weeks.

It was all done in our studio!

Church Windows part 2

Here are a few more photos of the church window project. It is hard to understand the scale of these pieces. They were made so that each panel opens like a door so the windows can be cleaned. The top arch panel hinges at the bottom edge of that panel so that it will fold down so that section can also be washed.

Three months went into these steel grates. Many people worked on this project and everyone was thrilled when it was done!

Church Windows

Here is our first large project posting on the blog. You will notice in the picture the iron work over the windows. The bulk of what you see in the photo was done by a local welding company, Gross Brothers Welding. We were brought into the project to help complete the artwork that was being attached to the steel frames. The photo shows one side of the room. The exact same iron work was also on the other end of the room. So you are seeing half the project! Wowzers it was a big project!

Wow!

Wow, here we are with another blog. This time the blog is for me to show some larger specialty work we do. In addition I will show some of the software that we use and how. Should prove to be interesting! Hope you will follow along!