Stolen Art No. 3

The Art piece was stolen from Shurgard Maastricht Noord whilst in their safe area.
They were unwilling to look through their security video because the manager said the disk was full, but actually he just couldn't care less.
No claim was entertained and the police didn't even bother to take finger prints.
Excluding the materials, a total loss of well more than 4500 hours of work spanning over some 20 years.
Tough times.

This was my first project that I delved into the Steam Punk fantasy genre.The whole project took about 300 hours of work done over a few months.

I learned a lot about making fantasy projects, particularly that I had the vasbyt to continue until everything was finished.

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A buddy gave me a couple of old printers that were destined for the scrap heap.
I love taking things apart, and inside these printers I found a ton of cogs and gears.
So I made a couple of rubber molds of various gears and cast then with my spin casting machine.
So the Dino War Machine actually started like this, with the wax models being burnt out.

After casting, the flask is plunged into cold water and when it has cooled down to water temperature, the now changed from wax to brass gears in the plaster are exposed.

Brass can be tricky to cast, but these came out surprisingly well.

I draw a rudimentary sketch and then just start from one side and work myself to the other end. So this is the start of the spine.

I added a belly to the spine and soldered some gears in.

More of the same.

This is the only picture I have of this stage, but I am cutting out brass sheeting to get the feel of the legs.  With subsequent projects I use cardboard now—duh.

I also started the head and the top and bottom body panels.

Another view

The head being formed.  I make my own silver solder. @ 30 grams Fine Silver       9.2 grams Copper    6.9 grams Zinc  Makes for a easy solder that flows well.

Also the legs were being constructed.

Hollow fabrication.

Nearly completed.

Once the basic leg shape was completed, I started to form the claws.
The front bar across is just to hold everything temporally.

Being fitted to the legs.

Filed the claws down and cleaned them up a bit.

Forming and sculpting the head.

Then came the time to introduce the guns.Of course I am going to make mean looking Gatling guns, just like the one on a Warthog jet.

Here are two of them being assembled.

The gun mechanism that holds everything to the Dino Machine.

One side fitted to the Dino Machine.

At this stage there needed to be more bang bang stuff, so I decided to make two more guns. I also started to work on the tail, some thing that I spent much too much time making models for.

Here the basic final design of the tail was fitted.

The head, with its various tubes and sensors attached. Much more was still to be fitted.
The eyes to me are always the most important and difficult to get right the first time.
I have no pictures of all the models I made but after about the eighth time I got them right.

Here the reflector on the tail is being built.
Eventually, I really liked the idea, like this radar/sonar reflector connected straight to the guns.

Anyway, being the grass hopper brain that I am, I lost all the rest of the pictures when a giant lightning strike killed my computer and drive and everything attached to it.
The grass hopper part was that there was no backup of the later construction pictures.
This picture shows the components all finished and polished and stabilized.

The display base is made of Mukwa wood that I carved.

Making the terrain of the display. That pile of thorns was tricky to solder in those positions.

So much so that I had to first position them in wax, then cast plaster over them to hold them and then solder them together.

My workshop security checking the scene out.

I made the display box out of 3 mm glass and brass angle sectioning.
The case is held in place by four screws that go through holes drilled in the glass.

The rest are all boutique pictures. The eyes are made from filed silver that was blackened with Liver of Sulfur.

The silver part of the eye is held in place by a 14 ct gold screw that also doubles up as the pupil.

There are a whole bunch of 'radiator' tubes on his belly. Very important for a war machine to keep his cool in the heat of battle.

Below is my contact email and other websites.

hansmeevis@gmail.com http://meevis.com/jewelry-catalog.htm https://www.jewelry-tutorials.com/ https://www.drill-straight-tools.com/