Artcon 2012 *part 2
As many of you saw from my facebook post last night my piece of art sold for $325, and I can now cross off “sell a piece of art” from my bucket list. I was required to keep my art under wraps until the event (not sure why, but I obliged). So here it is
I was given an 18″ x 18″ piece of plywood and with the help of Christina and the laser cutter at the dallas makerspace I built “circular logic.” I had the idea about 2 weeks ago to make a representation of how thinking and logic gets the gears turning in your head. Being me, I took a very literal approach to the art. The brain was designed in adobe illustrator and then printed 1:1 and used as a reference and then it was painted onto the board. I designed the gears to have a perfect 1″ center to center distance so that I could make a few sizes and adjust on the fly the layout. I laser cut a perforated drill guide which had the correct increment spacing for the gears which I used for the layout, I started with gear 1 then measure to the next gear and drill; move the guide to the new hole and continue, with this method I was able to make a cool gear train where everything spins smoothly with just a drill. Originally I was thinking of making a paper pattern for the axle locations and drilling but what I came up with allowed for each hole to take up the tolerance of the system. I am going to play with this method more in the future as you can do some fun layouts, and I think I could build some actual functional (robots) gearboxes with this method in without having a mill or cnc machine. For the axles I used t-nuts hammered into the back of the board and just 1/4-20 bolts. The hardest part of this was ensuring that the bolts were loose enough to allow everything to spin free, while not allowing too much slop (the largest gear has almost a 8″ dia), I did this all by hand and then red loctited** them in place.
As I mentioned in my previous post the piece was built as part of an organization called art conspiracy and this event specifically benefited “Girls Rock Dallas.” Girls Rock Dallas is currently offering a one week summer day camp to girls ages 8-17, providing music instruction in guitar, vocals, drums and bass, as well as life-skill workshops. The campers will form bands and learn how to write original songs together to perform at the camp’s showcase. As a beneficiary of Art Con 8, they will get closer to their goal of doubling the enrollment for the 2013 camp.
I am going to ditch my engineering dreams and become a full time artist after this event? Probably not, but I am more than willing and hope to be selected to participate again next year.
Stats: 150 pieces were for sale, the average sale price was $219.51, The max sale was $1050, the total amount raised through art $29,635(not counting admissions), My piece was the 28th highest selling piece 🙂
There are some more photos of the event available here. http://www.dallasobserver.com/slideshow/the-people-of-art-con-8-38152528/34/
**note: from experience previous to this build loctite reacts with acrylic and makes for a bad situation. If you have to use both together always put the loctite on the nut and not the bolt and don’t ever get any on the plastic.
