Coming up to the 50th aniversary of Sir Edmund Hilary's historic climbing of Mt Everest, a commemorative bronze statue was commissioned by The Hermitage at Mt Cook. Dunedin based artist Bryn Jones carved the portrait in clay and approached me to do the founding. I took the job and approached sculptors Jesse Stevens and Colin Howes to work with me as project team. The three of us worked for ten weeks intensively to finish the portrait in time for the 50th birthday celebrations. It was an interesting challenge technically but this alone would probably not have persuaded me to take the time away from my own work (I no longer accept casting commissions as a rule), but ultimately I agreed to work for another sculptor again because I felt it was a chance to do something to honor a great New Zealander. The Prime Minister opened the finished statue at the Hermitage Hotel where it is now permanently sited.

On a slightly sad note we never got the chance to meet Sir Edmund Hilary, because were only offered two invitations to the opening event at the Hermitage and felt after working together as a team that if if we all couldnt go then none of us should. So Colin and Jesse and I didnt go to the official opening, Bryn Jones shook Sir Hilary's hand and accepted congratulations for his sculpture. This is always the way for contracted technitians (see previous comments about not accepting casting jobs, with a wry smile), we knew what we had done though; a damn professional job in a really short time, and that had to be enough. As the song says: dont thank me, just pay me!

Brief technical description of the casting process we used:

We made a waste plaster mold by shimming the wet clay master with aluminium sheet. The mold was jacketed into a frame that made registration much less of a problem. We laid in a wax shell of the entire figure and sectioned it again into logical casting peices, thinking about minimising distortion. This was a risky strategy in many ways but fitted the projects time and budget constraints. We started the job in late January and the work had to be completed by April, there was no room for mistakes or time to re mold any mispours.

The wax sections were pinned with stainless steel and burnt out with nine coats of zircon flour based slurry. During the later stages of investment it required two people to handle several of the shells, particularly the head. After burnout we reinforced the shells with fibreglass matting. Casting the head was the most nervous moment as it was cast in a single large heavy peice that would have been difficult to reproduce at the same level of detail a second time from the plaster. The very strong investment and careful vent design meant that we had a %100 casting success with only minor cracking and only one mold leak. Sir Ed's climbing rope leaked during the pour, that was a bit of an adrenaline moment but caused no serious damage to the casting.

Once all the peices were successfully cast the job was much less stressfull. Because of our care with the mold registration we had few problems with sections not fitting. The problems that we did have were solved with large clamps and form adjustment with nylon hammers. The welding was actually quite fast, only about a week. The joins were welded on the interior by MIG for extra strength and on the outside with TIG and color matched silicon bronze filler made a neat job. Here the care I took with the section planning really paid off, all the weld seams were in places that were relatively easy to fettle and we lost very little of the excellent surface detail that Bryn modelled into his original.

There are more details with the project images, click on the thumbnails above.