Apart from some steel rolling, cutting and bending, Gizmo made most of the sculpture components in house. Besides sourcing the tens of thousands of bits of hardware needed to hold everything together, and solving countless design challenges, Eric Reedy programmed their CNC router to perform a surprising variety of tasks. Using the router, Eric cut out the 10,000 aluminum pieces which then got hand-bent and riveted to hold the reflectors on the rods. He even cut the plastic pulley guides and the aluminum thimble plates on the router. Just assembling all the parts was a huge task and I’m so grateful to everyone’s handiwork bending, riveting, cutting, painting, drilling, lifting, and all the activities that were needed to fabricate the Nebula.
Meanwhile Jon Eaton lead the team to assemble the truss and ring, and he nearly single handedly completed the 3000 plus welds holding everything together. These are big pieces of metal, with the super flanges weighed over 100 lbs each and the entire sculpture weighs over 11,000 lbs! And the whole time he made it look easy! The steel components were painted in house, while the aluminum was sent out for anodizing. After the multitude of parts were assembled, cables cut, pulley angles set, all components were loaded onto one truck for the drive to Texas. Throughout the fabrication everyone at Gizmo stuck to their principle of not compromising my artistic vision while tackling the thousand’s of mechanical and material decisions needed to complete a sculpture of this scale. Thanks Gizmo!
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