Compass Points
Aluminum

George W. Hart

This is a fifty-two inch diameter version of my Compass Points sculpture, made of laser-cut aluminum. It was assembled with the help of many attendees at the 2008 Gathering for Gardner conference. Photos of the Atlanta assembly event are online here.

Before shipping the parts down to Atlanta, I prepared them in my studio in New York and obtained the help of several graduate students from Stony Brook University to help me with a test assembly. I wanted to practice the assembly steps and make sure everything actually fit together as designed.

There are one hundred twenty of these aluminum brackets and five hundred ten stainless steel hex-head nuts and bolts holding the sculpture together. So it took several hours to assemble. Before that, I had cleaned, deburred, and sanded the components, and bent the brackets to the proper angles (sixty are 90 degrees and sixty are 116.5 degrees).

The brackets bolt inside to join adjacent pairs of the sixty long components.

During the test assembly, we had to focus on the ins and outs of how the parts weave through each other to form an intricate interdigitation.

A big thank you to the crew from Stony Brook who helped me test-assemble it: Irina Kostitsyna, Alex Mohr, Tuncay Tekle, and Giordano Fusco.

I later made four feet for it to be displayed on, then disassembled it, packed up all the parts, and shipped them to Atlanta for the final assembly. I have also made a smaller wood version of this design and a full-scale wood version. I am working up towards one final version of Compass Points, in steel, at a much larger size. Let me know if you have a good location for it.