Warning: The week we poured the 40-foot bronze statue base was a total nightmare

Last spring, we got the contract for a huge public art piece in St. Louis. The core was a single pour for a massive base, and everything went wrong from the start. Our main furnace had a refractory crack on Monday, losing us a full heat of metal and putting us a day behind. Then, on pour day, the damn gating system we built just could not handle the volume fast enough, and we started getting cold shuts in the lower sections. I remember the foreman yelling, 'It's setting up in the runners!' We had to stop, re-melt a backup charge, and re-rig the whole thing while the mold was still hot. We finally got it filled, but the stress was unreal. Has anyone else had a big pour go that sideways because of gating, and what did you change for the next one?

3 comments

3 Comments

nancyg141d ago

That gating failure sounds like a total design flaw, right?

claire_grant341d ago

Remember that gate at the mall last year, @nancyg14? It broke if you looked at it wrong. Pretty sure they used paper clips and hope to hold it together.

jamesf291d ago

Depends on what they were trying to do with the gating. Sometimes a feature fails because it was badly made, but other times it's a cost-cutting choice that backfired. Was this a case of the designers not understanding how people would actually use it, or did the company just not want to pay for a better part? That's the real question for me.