All the Viking ship armatures are now welded. Every piece (23 per ship) has been sent off to the galvanizers to get its shine coat of zinc. So far we only have enough back to build one and a half halves of the ship.
One more day
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Dan Sawatzky’s Blog
Ship shaped
Yesterday and today were busy days as the crew worked hard to sculpt the skin of half of the first Viking ship hull. Those many weeks of preparation made the sculpting process straightforward. The hull now looks bigger than ever! The second half of the hull will be ready for sculpting early next week – about the same time we’ll begin the painting of the first half.
Heads or tails?
With the cutting, fitting and welding on the Viking ships now behind us we can concentrate on the sculpting at last. Today that work began on the first Viking ship beginning with the head and tail of the keel and the shields which hang on the side of the ship’s hull. Things went well and we begin the actual hull of the ship tomorrow. While the crew sculpted I spent the day with our client on the next project
Last weld on Viking ship structure!
Just before quitting time today we did the last weld on the second Viking ship. It’s been nine weeks of cutting, fitting, welding and grinding to get the structures of this project done. There’s still little bits of welding on the dragon keel for the front plus some stands and pallets for shipping but that won’t take long. We still have to send the rest of the pieces to the galvanizer but one half of the first ship is now ready for sculpting and the rest won’t be far behind
It’s looking like the movie now!
It is always interesting to watch the steps of each piece we create. First, there’s the development of the idea on paper and on the screen, sometimes with small scale models. Then the piece goes through the engineering stage, to make sure the structure underneath fits inside and holds everything up securely. Then it’s out to the shop to begin construction.
Big visual progress
Work continues on the Viking ship project for Motiongate Park in Dubai. With the deadline quickly approaching the entire crew is working hard to finish off the features.The piece closest to finish is the large target. The last coats of the base colours were painted on yesterday. That meant we could apply the glazes today. The painting crew worked in teams, liberally applying the brown and dark grey glazes and then judiciously wiping them off.
Viking ship progress
There hasn’t been a lot of routing done in the shop over the last weeks as we concentrate on the extremely large Viking ships and target features for Motiongate theme park in Dubai. We are making great progress however. Both ships are now out of the shop getting their final framework welded into place. They are just too large to do inside the shop building. The two big mast assemblies head off to the galvanizers today.
New video feature of EnRoute 6
Todays project is a simple dimensional washroom sign. The purpose of posting it here is to show off a new feature of the newest version of EnRoute (6) =. This feature is that each function has a video attached to it. This is a huge plus for those learning the program or simply expanding their capabilities
Large Viking target sculpted
The router has been very quiet of late as we concentrate on getting out the large sculpted features of the Viking project at Motiongate in Dubai. The process has been long and arduous at times. I remember well the first time I watched the movie ‘How to train your dragon’. As I looked at the wonderful textures and color of all of the invented digital world in that movie I thought how cool it would be to build it for real