I’m at the end of a long weekend where I have worked non-stop on the fourth sculpture. I’m nearly finished.

The capping rail still looks like a capping rail but look closely and you can see it has been sawn into 84 pieces!

I have spent the week sawing each piece at 5 degrees to the vertical on a bandsaw. Then sanding and drilling each piece so they can be screwed and glued together again. That’s 168 sides to sand, 168 holes drilled and 168 countersinks. Then 168 lead holes for the screws so they don’t split each section. This weekend I have just painted the 168 sides of each piece before fixing everything back together.

I’ve moved into my studio because I have reached a painting stage and I want reduced dust.

Oh, then I decided to put spacers between each segment in order to show off the red a bit more. So I have just cut and sanded 84 spacers. And then I thought these might look effective if they were painted blue. Don’t ask me why but you will see. As you can see I’ve not worked everything out beforehand. I’m designing as I go along.

Now the paint is drying and tomorrow I will glue each blue edged spacer to each of the segments.

Then I’ll screw it all together to see how it looks. It will make a change to actually finish a sculpture.