Creating Welded Sculpture

Nathan Cabot Hale

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780486281353
• eBook ISBN: 9780486139357
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Techniques

In this generously illustrated guide, newly revised and updated, a well-known American sculptor shares his forty years of experience working with welded sculpture techniques. Nathan Cabot Hale begins with the basic assumption that it is necessary for a sculptor-welder to have the same professional skills as a good job-welder. To help readers gain those skills, he demonstrates both traditional and comparatively new welding methods step by step, including the oxyacetylene technique in modeling small-scale figurative sculpture.
Mr. Hale first discusses the basic tools and techniques of welded sculpture, then addresses the construction of abstract and organic shapes and modeling solid figures. This is followed by detailed coverage of finishing techniques, arc welding, and welding large-scale commissioned works. He even dispenses helpful practical advice on the economics of fine art — exhibiting work, staying alive, searching out public and private support, and more.
Over 80 helpful diagrams and more than 100 photographs accompany the text, demonstrating techniques and procedures and depicting works in progress as well as finished works. In a new chapter written specially for this edition, Mr. Hale shares the heartening artistic philosophy he has developed over his long and distinguished career. Sculptors at many levels of accomplishment will find his book instructive and inspiring.

1

Basic Tools of Welded Sculpture

The basic assumption of this book is that it is necessary for a sculptor-welder to have the same professional skill as a good job-welder. Not everyone agrees. These people do not seem to care about technique as long as the welds appear to hold together. The whole point is that a bad weld will not hold together in time. Only a skillfully made weld can last. If the sculptor develops the skill and craftsmanship of welding, he will be able to create any kind of weld and produce any kind of textured surface he desires.

In some quarters, there has been an irrational fight against technical skill and against knowledge of form construction in art for a number of years. Unfortunately, this controversy has spread into the new field of welded sculpture as well. I want to mention this debate since you will be subjected to these ideas, and will have to examine the facts and decide for yourself. Is it possible to “just go ahead and express yourself,” or should you spend time accumulating basic technical skill in your chosen medium?

There have been a number of people who have taken up welded sculpture who have never mastered the fundamentals of craftsmanship. Some of them have gotten considerable recognition. But quite often in these cases, the sculptor has mastered another sculpture medium before he became interested in welding. In other words, he was already technically oriented to form. This orientation may give his forms a feeling of quality, but his sense of form does not guarantee he handles metal to his fullest capability. Actually, there is no real alternative to learning the craft of welded sculpture.

To learn welding for sculpture, I spent four years working in various kinds of welding shops. Since that time, I have worked steadily as a sculptor-welder with some success. Because I had been oriented toward art all my life, the years I spent learning the facts of metal work were difficult for me. However, the disciplined thinking of the industrial welder which I learned has been invaluable. I learned about structure, form functions, and work patterns. I learned a lot of bare facts about mechanical and geometrical shapes. In this book, I hope to crystallize my experiences for you so that you will not have to spend extra time in non-art jobs just to learn what someone else already knows. This book is intended to give you all the facts that a sculptor-welder will need.

As you have accepted me as your teacher, you will more or less acquire some of the things that I have learned the hard way. But all basic learning is done the hard way, namely through effort and determination. One of my main teaching goals is to encourage you to value craftsmanship and to acquire as much skill as you can. Teaching and learning are a two way proposition; even though I may not be right next to you to encourage you to put forth your best effort, I am there in spirit, urging you to master all these basic exercises.

Perhaps you have never given much thought to the matter of tools, but now that you are beginning to learn to do welded sculpture, I think it is a good idea for you to start out by understanding their origins and functions. Today, even though tools are important to the very existence of our society, they are too often taken for granted. Since welded sculpture uses some of the most advanced tools that man has developed, you must first understand the most basic thing about all tools. Tools are extensions of our human anatomical functions. They reach; they touch; they are used to model and shape our environment. Today, tools even affect the growth and development of the human species itself.

ORIGIN OF TOOLS

The use of tools goes back to the very beginning of mankind. The cultural development of the human race has gone hand in hand with the development and use of tools for shaping and understanding matter and energy. Even the stone axe and the stone drill had their period of growth and development at a time when they were an advanced and sophisticated technology.

A visit to the local museum of natural history will show you how the art of stone tool-making grew over periods of thousands of years. At the beginnings of the Egyptian culture, for example, stone-working had reached a very high peak of development. But someone started smelting metal from copper ore, and that gradually drove the stone tool-makers into a new line of business, although there may have been some academic die-hards who fought the “new-fangled” ways for a century or two. As a matter of fact, today, some of the older academic sculptors regard welding as heretical. This would seem to teach us that technology changes, but people do not.

By Greco-Roman times, the basic tool principles had all been discovered, and nothing really new has been added since that time. The new discoveries have come from adapting tool principles to new sources of motive energy: water, steam, electricity, gasoline, diesel, and nuclear power. Behind all these advances stand man’s anatomical functions, and the basic modeling capacities of his life energy.

To me, there has always been an implied moral in this understanding of the origin of tools. I feel that the user has an inherent responsibility for the best possible use of the tool. Some people never become quite worthy of the heritage of tools. They misuse the tools themselves; they do not appreciate or understand their meaning or history; and they never realize what an honor it is to be the inheritor of these implements that make wealth, shape human destiny, and model the world we live in.

So when you hold a tool in your hand, pause for a moment to reflect on the knowledge that you hold an object that took thousands of years of thought and striving to develop. A tool represents thousands of years of ancestral pondering; it is the crystallized hopes of your forefathers. In its very nature, a tool implies a logic, an understanding, and an obligation for you to do the best job of which you are capable.

Good sculptors love their tools and take delight in using them well. There is a sense of pleasure in the feel of a hammer, a pair of pliers, or any tool that you have carefully chosen and worked with for a few years. Tools are beautiful in themselves; and they grow more beautiful in time, the more they are used. Treat your tools well and kindly and they will serve you faithfully through the years.

A great part of welded sculpture depends on the use of tools. We could not make our kind of sculpture without them. And since part of the sculptor’s reward results from the act of work itself, this knowledge of tools will give your experience a feeling of depth.

BASIC TOOLS

Although welded sculpture does involve a significant investment in tools, it requires less equipment than you might think. A great many tools are likely to be found in any well-equipped family tool box. Here are the basic tools you will need to begin welding.

1. Torch handle
2. Tips 1,2,3
3. Oxygen hose, 20’
4. Acetylene hose, 20’
5. Oxygen regulator
6. Acetylene regulator
7. Torch lighter
8. Goggles
9. Gloves
10. Hammer
11. Cold Chisels
12. Pliers
13. Hacksaw
14. Screw driver
15. Wrench
16. Steel tapemeasure
17. Steel square

Later on, you may want to add some of the other equipment I describe in this chapter, but these seventeen items are the only indispensable ones.

THE NATURE OF OXYGEN AND ACETYLENE

The most important tools you will use are two gases. One, oxygen, is always present in the earth’s atmosphere and constitutes about one fifth of its volume. The English scientist, Joseph Priestley, discovered oxygen in 1774. It was later found that oxygen is the chief supporter of the combustion of all substances, although it does not burn by itself.

The other gas we use in welded sculpture is acetylene. This gas is not ordinarily found in the atmosphere but is, rather, a manufactured compound. In 1836, Edmund Davy compounded a highly flammable gas by mixing water with calcium carbide. This gas was later named acetylene. But it took sixty years until a French chemist named Le Chatelier discovered, in 1895, that when these gases were brought together under pressure and ignited, they produced a flame that would burn at a temperature between 5700° F. and 6300° F.

This discovery came at a time when science had developed ways to produce both oxygen and acetylene gases in quantity. This soon led to the development of the oxyacetylene welding process. Since this process had many useful applications, it was then and is still being improved by research. Today this welding process is used in every country of the world.

Both oxy...

Table of contents

• DOVER BOOKS ON ART INSTRUCTION AND ANATOMY
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Foreword to the Dover Edition
• Also by
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 - Basic Tools of Welded Sculpture
• 2 - Basic Welding Technique
• 3 - Constructing Abstract Shapes
• 4 - Constructing Organic Shapes
• 5 - Modeling Solid Figures
• 6 - Finishing the Sculpture
• 7 - Welded Steel Sculpture with the Electric Arc
• 8 - Welding Large Scale Commissioned Works
• 9 - Some Notes on the Economics of Fine Arts
• 10 - Gallery of Sculptor-Welders
• 11 - Beyond the Cycle of Life
• Bibliography
• Index