"American Beauty" almost finished

iMac fixit morning

My optical drive likes the last DVD I burned so much that it won't give it up. It took awhile to figure out that the drive had died.  So today I'm a techie.  

First thing was to order a new optical drive as well as a bare hard drive docking station.

The hard drive in this iMac was fine but it was only 750 GB and I have a couple of new empty 2TB sea gates laying around, so, while I've got the thing apart I might as well put the new bigger drive in.

I downloaded a copy of Carbon Copy cloner and cloned the internal hard drive to the new seagate drive.  Then I cleaned my desk.

Ready to disassemble

Use suction cups to pull the front glass off

Off it comes

Good opportunity to clean the grime under the glass

Removing the screen exposes the guts

old optical drive out

Both new drives ready to go in

Almost back together

Success!! Back up and running

 OK, now back to work and off to the OVAC's 12x12 fundraiser tonight.

"American Beauty" mold making finished!!!!

The final day of mold making on "American Beauty" by the Deep in the Heart crew.

They got here on Wednesday, worked 17 hour days for 4 days, and left Sunday morning having finished a high quality silicon rubber mold of a 4 X life-size sculpture titled "American Beauty."

They loaded up the 81 separate mold sections on their trailer as well as a couple of my large sculptures that Clint will take to his gallery in Austin, Texas.

They left my studio cleaner than when they got here. ( I was very happy about that)

The next step in the "American Beauty" process is casting waxes into the mold sections. This will be done at the Deep in the Heart foundry in Bastrop, Texas (just outside of Austin)

more to come.........

Mold making crew (+ me)

plaster mother mold cont....

building the mother mold flanges

mother mold pretty much finished

getting ready to stencil mold IDs on each section

beginning to stencil

finished with stenciling

Clint drilling alignment holes in mother mold

first mold section being removed

off comes the mother mold section

cleaning up the rubber mold sections

removed mold sections layed out

50 mold sections on the torso alone

matching rubber to mother molds

mold almost completely removed

Patty helped match rubber to mother mold sections

mold removal done, loading the trailer

Early Saturday evening

beginning to load mold

Gary strapping down "Paradise"

Beginning studio clean up

rolling up tarp

moving torso off the tarp

Tarp is rolled up with all the debris 

Tarp went directly to the dumpster

early Sunday morning; ready to roll back to Austin

So long!!