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Art and design studio Pneu Haus came to us looking for a partner who could help them engineer and fabricate a metal sculpture based on a metal art concept they had imagined for an outdoor sculpture park near Denver, Colorado. Their design consisted of hundreds of mirror polished stainless steel panels that would be interconnected and mounted 8-10 feet off the ground.
Derecktor Design developed and engineered an economical manufacturing solution for their sculpture design that could withstand the minimum wind and precipitation (snow, etc) requirements of the installation site in Thornton, Colorado while still meeting the project budget requirements. Here is how we did it.
While the initial design called for welding of the entire structure, we found the process did not meet the economical and visual requirements of the sculpture. So we set about coming up with a better way.
Derecktor Design was able to design, prototype, test, and validate an interconnection solution for the stainless pieces that we could incorporate directly into the cuts of the waterjet shapes. This eliminated the need to design and manufacture an expensive and custom connection part to assemble the hundreds of components in their design. This new design allowed for easier and more cost effective manufacturing and assembly using inexpensive fasteners that would not interfere with maintaining the required mirror-polish finish and clean look on the final sculpture.
We then produced the 750 pieces of stainless steel using our waterjet machine and a local partner to complete the mirror-finish polishing.
Derecktor Design leveraged computer aided design (CAD) to engineer the sculpture, then used one of their CNC milling machines to build the mounting structure, and welded the Stainless Steel mounting column that would suspend the sculpture over 8ft off the ground.
The design was proven through mathematical modeling and computational Finite Element Analysis, and the structure was approved for installation by the Thornton city-appointed engineer.
The sculpture was ultimately deployed in January of 2024 at Sky Park in Thornton, Colorado standing over 8-feet tall.
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