Tac B

Hello again everyone, I am happy to be writing with a great little sculpture to share. This is the first piece fully conceived and realized in my new shop.

This work is a bit of a sketch really, it exists between many different things that I am working on, and is an attempt to connect and understand them each a little bit better.

For starters, the overall shape of this work is derived from at least three places. First is the humble spring collet. Collets come in many shapes and sizes, and I use them daily in my work. I guess I have been looking at them long enough that they have finally infiltrated my design ethos.

A second source of inspiration is from a design I am working on as part of my research collaboration at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. That project is moving along slowly, but one element within it  felt worth appropriating it into another, smaller composition.

Also, it kind of reminds me of this older work I made over 20 years ago. It is (according to my records) the 13th machined sculpture I ever made. This current one is number 174 by my counting, so it has been quite a journey.

Another thread I have been slowly tugging at is the concept of “Tactical Aesthetic”. That is (and this is my observation) there is within many machining circles and various product design genres, a tendency toward an overly menacing, faceted, and technical adornment that exists separately from any sort of real functionality. The idea of “Tactical” not as a description of function, but as an aesthetic. A decorative motif. 

This Tactical aesthetic flows out of the firearms and security industry, and the many products and gear that support it (knife making included). But this aesthetic has taken on a life of its own, and wormed its way into pen making, watches, flashlights, and countless other unconnected product design spheres. So much so that I see it (intentionally or not) popping up in stranger and stranger places. 

Have you ever noticed that a lot of lifestyle products aimed (primarily) at men are overly toothy in some way? Like, what is a tactical wallet anyway? I am not sure. It also permeates many video game and movie aesthetics as well.  

While the idea of tactical aesthetic possesses the potential to be politically loaded, I am much more interested in it as an example of an organic visual language. Whatever it is, it seems interconnected with the inherent aesthetic that machine work itself lends, so it is something I feel compelled to understand, if only in a more academic way.

 

One way I approach understanding something is to isolate it, or even place it in a new context, which is why a series of tactical sculptures (whatever that comes to mean) seems like a natural fit. To that end, I am calling this work the Tactical Collet Bead or Tac B for short.

I understand we live in polarizing times and not everyone will be on board with a neutral exploration of this nature, but I am committed to probing this notion on my own terms; in a completely agnostic and anthropological way. So this is a first little stab at something I am trying to get my head around.

 

Technical Notes: There are a few interesting technical aspects of this piece I'd like to note. For starters, the outer shell of this piece was devilishly complicated to machine, as it has long unsupported bits that want to flex and vibrate as it is being cut. It required some real 4D thinking to plan out the order of operations to yield a successful part.

Above you can see the various stages of production. The key was keeping the ends constrained until the last step. Then I was able to insert a plug into the inner diameter and clamp the Outer diameter to it, in order to hold everything in place. Then I could turn off the end stock and free the ends of what became sort of like tines.

I am going to change some cutting operations on the next run, but the basic process was proved out.

 

This work also has a unique assembly method that was inspired by a chance meeting. 

One of my newest friends (Zach Fredin) whom I met last summer at Haystack Mountain school of Crafts, pointed me at some of his work using flexures in mechanical assemblies. The work itself is fascinating, but the thing that grabbed me most was how he used taper pins to secure his devices in place.

It is simple and clever. The taper pins straddle the interface between two parts in a way that wedges them together and firmly locks them in place. I just love it for its simplicity and effectiveness. A younger me would have put screws everywhere to make this work.

While the taper pin method isn’t what I ended up using with my own work, it did inspired me to think about how to use pins in interesting ways.

 

For this work, I instead used overlapping pins that have interlocking radii.

This takes advantage of the fact that the tines of the outer body are somewhat flexible. This flexing allows just enough movement to push smaller pins past what would otherwise be an obstructed fit. The outer assembly bends out of the way to create clearance to press the smaller pins in place and provides tension that keeps everything nicely trapped in place afterwards.

The video above helps demonstrate the assembly mechanism a little better than my writing. It picks up around the 5 minute mark.

Overall dimensions are 2.55" long, and 1.25" Diameter. 

Note for Collectors: For those of you who collect, I am going to put together a pre-order for a small batch of these works for early next week. If you are interested in adding one of these to your collection. Look for details to land on Tuesday Feb 24th at 11 AM.

I will post the usual sign up links, and send an email with pricing and other information for the sale.

If there are questions or comments in the meantime, I am happy to hear them.

More soon.