Looking forward to the shaping community
 

Hey everyone, Mike from Rockford, IL. During the day I am a mild mannered aerospace engineer, but by night I take my frustrations out on a sandbag and some CRS and AL. Well, not lately...I recently had 3 vertebrae in my back fused together and can't bend, twist, lift or do anything much except read forums and dream about the day I can get back in the shop and start thumpin away. I am hoping to get some advice on creating a buck from a clay scale model. No high-Tech computer, CNC whizbang stuff. I want old school...clay to wood station buck. Look forward to meeting fellow shapers!

Hi Mike welcome to the forum
Peter

Mike; Welcome to All Metal Shapers. I'm "looking forward" to a similar procedure this fall. Good thing for forums like this to pass the time. I sit in my chair 40' from my shop and have completed a dozen jobs in my head since spring. Watched hired help install new windows in my house. :mad: Better days ahead. All the best in your recovery.

Welcome, Mike.

If you want old-school, I don't think you can do better than reading up on boat lofting. The techniques are directly applicable to buck making.

Dave Cameron

Welcome Mike, working from clay to wood station buck is route I've taken. There is a lot of helpful shapers here and several masters as well. Get dvds from Peter, David and take a class at Dagger tool in Detroit area and you be well on your way.

Thanks to everyone for the warm welcome.

Barry, thanks for the kind wishes. Thankfully, my surgeon says all looks good and things are healing nicely.

Cameron, oddly enough I am familiar with lofting, having built a small sailboat a while back. That was easier for me, going from an existing drawing to 3d object. I'm having difficulty going from 3d model to actual scale 3d object. I read about taking vertical slices of the model, enlarging them on an overhead and tracing the profiles to get the buck stations. I can't and don't really want to do this with my model though. It is 1/4 scale.

Mike, I do have most of Peter's DVDs and took Craig's Dagger class, all great stuff. We worked from existing bucks though and didn't learn how to make one from a clay model. I look forward to learning from the folks here on how best to get surface profiles to turn into buck stations.

Mike,

No need to cut up your model. There have been threads on this forum about taking the lines off an existing car. The same could be done with the model. Would be easier because of the smaller size, but the lines would have to be lofted and faired in full size.

Perhaps someone here can steer you to those threads.

Dave Cameron

Scale model to Station Buck
 

Dave,
Thanks! I look forward to learning all about it.

G'day Mike and Welcome.:)

Cheers John

Welcome to the forum Mike.

David

Making a large buck from a scale model is a class I taught in NH 10 years ago. It was a bit more complicated than simple but it involved making some simple gages that magnified the point-to-point distances, after laying out the flat profiles of all the "slices" of the model, in each view. We went from a 12in model to a 4 foot sculpture, and then covered that in shaped .050 aluminum.

iirc, Mark Goodenough was a principal shaper of some or all of the fancy reverse parts.

Yes Kent, thanks for the mention. That seminar was a bunch of fun. The four foot object was the Cat in the Hat's hat. I think we all learned a lot about the subject of enlargements and lofting, and that there are many ways to approach the task. The class was held in the sculpture studio of Jonathan Clowes, then of Walpole, NH. He had some ingenious methods of capturing information off scaled models for the sake of enlargement which didn't involve cutting or destroying the model to get the information. One such method used a drill press with a variety of pointers and sleds with layout scales printed on them- as a digitizing tool. He would scale up incrementally from a 14" tall model to a 14' model then actual size over 40' as in this sculpture: http://www.clowessculpture.com/portf.../canticle.html

As a side note, his studio also developed and produced the flexible shape patterns shown to Wray Schelin in preparation to build this same sculpture in veneered and painted aluminum.

For the sake of this thread the search words "measuring bridge" will turn up some useful info.