Hudson Life Building: Thirteen Arches
Those hexagon shapes I cut into the brick last week, well you are about to find out their purpose.
Construction
The work that I completed this week lit a fire under me, the last portions of the arches were one of two parts of this building that kept me up at night. In my humble opinion, I think I passed the first test, windows are my other nightmare.
Tenth Floor Windows
Before I finished the arches, I decided to finish off the windows on the tenth floor. I began by adding a .020x.060″ strip down the middle of the .125″ mullions. After that was done I framed in the windows with some .010x .030″ strip. If I did this step over again, I would have used .015″ thick strip instead. Lastly I added a strip of .015x .060″ on the mullion. This piece extends about one brick beyond the top of the window and one & a half bricks bellow the window.
Moulding
Above the tenth floor windows is a thin cut stone moulding detail between a few courses of brick. I simply cut three different strips of styrene to make it. The bottom run is .020x .060″ strip cut into quarter inch pieces so I would get the seams when I painted. The next run was some .015x .060″ cut to the quarter inch length and glued directly above the first course. Lastly I added some .040″ half round cut to the same lengths as before and then added to the face of the .015″ course. On the corners I had to bevel the half round to a 45° angle so each face would meet.
Arch layering
The first layer of the arches is the layer that will cover the tiny pieces that I glued to the inside of the arch last week. To create the illusion of individual cut stones on the arch detail I had the digital craft cutter scribe in the angled lines. I used .010″ sheet for these parts and the cutter will only go about .005″ deep. When snapping out the arches from the sheet I had to be careful not to snap the at the joints between each block. Next I had to cut 45° angles on the upper corners with my chopper, now they will fit in to the required spot.
Arch base layer
The next layer had a few challenges and I believe I came through unscathed. Again it was cut from .010″ sheet and I had the joints between the blocks again but with two arched lines as well. After the careful removal of the cut arch pieces, I needed to cut one or both of the ends so they would butt up to each other. Two of the cut lines acted as guidelines for where to cut, for the majority of the arches this worked perfectly, a few needed a little tweaking. Adding these completed the basic arch structure.
Arches
Arches
The last detail needing to be added were little blocks that followed the arches in between the two arched cuts. The blade created a tiny ridge when it made these cuts, these acted as a perfect trough for the blocks to sit in and kept them inline with the circular pattern. The blocks were cut to the tiny size of .020x .030x .010″, I used an X-acto knife with an #11 blade to place all of the parts (130 in all).
Blocks being added
Finished arches
Finished arches
Conclusion
I was very relieved to get these arches done and because of the craft cutter, it was a cakewalk (and no, I don’t have a guy from Quickutz handing me a bag of cash). I have a busy and very tiring week ahead of me so be prepared for a slim to no post next Sunday.
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