The National Capitol Commission wanted to update Parliament Hill lighting with security cameras. They hired Metalumen in Guelph, ON to facilitate this. They hired me to create new patterns for casting in ductile iron, working from rough drawings and a copy of an old lamp post. It turned out that this post had been made 3 different ways in the last 80 years or so. I susupect that the copy I had was one of the older versions. See the detail here? Definitely forged, not cast:
Still, the order was to cast everything. And really quickly. I had a month to reverse engineer everything but the main post, and supply patterns. Here's how the decoration tooling looked:
above are the patterns as I carved them. Below are these patterns fastened to boards, boxed with alignments and some other decoration:
I guess the security camera housing did have to have certain dimensions, but I wish I could have been part of the conversation. Nobody 'designed' this. For such an important national site, I'm a bit sad that this looks so lumpy. See the first image for the installed element. Here's what the pattern looked like.
Parliament Hill security camera housing
It turned out that the supplied post tooling was from two different versions, and did not fit the casting I was supplied, so I wound up supplying that tooling, too, really late in the game, and really fast. Just another day at work.
So, this week I was asked to quote another phase of this project. looking forward to this!
So, this week I was asked to quote another phase of this project. looking forward to this!
RSS Feed
