Since my last post showing the Viking ship frame we have made significant progress. The engineer required us to use heavy steel members with plenty of welding. The ship has to withstand lots of moving as we put it together, it travels to the galvanizer and also the long journey to Dubai in the middle east.

To facilitate it’s removal from our (rather small) shop at to fit into the galvanizing vats it will break into six sections on each level. The portion that will sit in the water is thirty inches tall. The joining flange is made from eight sections of 3/8″ thick plasma cut plate steel. Identical pieces were bolted together to form the seam.

We then began welding up the floor section of the hull. It is essentially a giant truss. We will finish the ship frame to this degree before unbolting the six sections and taking them out of the shop. We will reassemble the piece outside in the parking lot before we build the sides and upper keels of the ship. It will all be test fitted before it gets disassembled once more to go to the galvanizers. When that is done we’ll reassemble the hull in two large sections for the concrete sculpture work. Two of these need to be built in the coming weeks.

We’ve been busy this week welding up the lower sections of the hull. The cutting files for the plate sections were all designed in EnRoute and cut on the MultiCam CNC plasma cutter. Even though there are many large pieces, they went together very quickly on account of the accuracy of the cuts. Three days into the assembly we are making good progress!

With the workshops now behind us we are full blast into building the Viking ships for the Motiongate project in Dubai. Between the workshops we kept the MultiCam CNC plasma cutter busy and cut through tons of steel plate. These custom cut pieces will form the shape of the hull at each level. They have been cleaned up and bevelled where they will be welded together.

We also brought in many hundreds of feet of heavy square steel tubing, pipe and angle iron which will be used to build the complicated structural framework of the ship.

Yesterday, we cleared the shop and began welding the precept pieces into place. It quickly became apparent just how massive the Viking ships will be… measuring almost forty feet long, seventeen feet high at the figurehead and fifteen feet wide through the beam of the ship. They fill up our shop in a hurry! The first section is below the waterline. The upper portions of the hull will bolt on top of this, disassembling to fit into the galvanizing, then partially bolted together for building and fitting into the shipping containers. It is BIG!

The pieces we are building for Motiongate in Dubai are the most engineered we have ever done. We created the first drawings of the incredibly strong frameworks that go inside the features. The target feature frame is a giant triangle truss that measures six feet wide by thirty feet long and three feet high. Our engineer then reviews our drawings, calculates the proposed forces and adds what he feels necessary. Our client’s engineers then reviews these drawings, before they are sent on to the client in Dubai. They send their notes back to our client and then on to us and our engineer for final changes. After the lengthy process is done we can at last begin the build.

Then it was time at last to begin the fun stuff. We prefabbed the head and tail of the Viking shipwreck and then placed them with the forklift before welding them firmly in place. This thing is pretty massive and will get a lot bigger yet as we add the rockwork and other bits of the ship around these first two elements.

Our MultiCam CNC plasma cutter got it’s most thorough workout since we took delivery of the magical machine last fall. We were cutting the base plates for the targets for the Viking ship project. Eight 5/8″ thick sheets of plate steel were precisely cut to the shapes we required for the base. Four more sheets of 3/8″ thick steel were cut for the dragon head and tail of the keel. We then moved them with the forklift into position and began the process of welding them and many other pieces together.

The accuracy of the files we created in EnRoute made the fitting and assembly of the base quick and easy. That means we can get through the structure part quicker and then move on to the theme work which it holds up. This is going to be a fun project!