[00:00] Hey everybody. My name is Nate Tyler. I am a metal kinetic sculptor. You are up here in the hills of Cayucos, Central part of California. Why don't you come in, take a shop tour, see how these things are made.
[00:40] So yeah, when I was a kid, this part of it was just a basketball hoop concrete slab because we had nothing to skateboard on, nothing to play basketball on, so my dad poured this slab way back in the day. Then when my parents sold the house, somebody put like a garage, you can kind of see the engineered trusses here. So when my wife and I bought it back, this was just like a totally enclosed, it was almost like a wine cellar or something. From there, had it balloon framed up there and just started adding on and it's pretty cool what it's evolved into, but it's a real... I guess you could say pieced together, but it looks like it was supposed to be all one thing at one point.
[01:21] The welding aspect of the sculpture work is obviously, you know, what makes these exoskeleton sculptures come to life. Essentially my dad was a self-taught welder. He sort of taught me and then I essentially taught myself. It's like, welding they always say is like time under the hood. You get better the more you do it. And I'm a sculptor and welding's one element of it. I weld almost every day.
[01:53] So right here you have my two Millermatic 255s. Brand new to me, essentially. And it's funny because everybody that comes out to my shop is like, "Why is there two?" But the reality is for my sculpture work, I'm doing a big mix of Corten steel, and then I'm doing a lot of stainless steel. It stings when I bought 'em because I'm just buying double everything. But that way I don't have to change out all the wires. It's just so much more efficient to have one that's always filled with your mild steel and then one that's filled with stainless steel. It just makes my workflow so efficient.
[02:26] These perform pulse welding. It's essentially dumping less heat in. And I thought for stainless steel, the sculpture work, and you really... stainless steel distorts like crazy when there's so much heat. That's why everything's painted red on this one, cause that's my mild steel. I've messed that up so many times doing stainless steel and accidentally welded with mild steel. So, anyways, I've got my workflow down on that.
[02:53] This is my old Miller 180... Millermatic 180. These were 240-volt welders. Even though they look tiny, they worked great for years. I keep this as just total backup. I essentially kept that around for this long because it took me a long time to figure out my new settings with pulse welding, but had some real trial and error.
[03:14] Um, and then over here I've got my Diversion 180. It's pretty entry level honestly as far as TIG welding goes, but, you know, I use this for different things, not for sculptures, but a lot of other metalworking. For me, I'm not like in the shop every day TIG welding, so it works great for me. You know, it'll do stainless, normal steel, and aluminum. It was mainly what I bought it for. But for me and my level, there's nothing harder than TIG welding aluminum. As I'm sure some people can relate to. Anyways, so yeah, those are my four welders. Essentially three are in operation, one is cruising on ice as a backup.
[03:50] The hoods are just... I literally have three up there because somebody comes over and wants to learn how to weld, I've just got 'em hanging there. They're all three different, but it's just kind of like an evolution of different hoods I have.
[04:02] So we're out here in the kind of dirtier zone of the shop that I built for, you know, really making a mess with all the metal stuff. With the sculpture work that I do, I end up doing a ton of grinding. So I use all different grinders, and I have so many lined up here, I actually have more, because it just takes so much time to be always changing the wheels and all the abrasives and whatnot, but yeah I mean as you can see I've got all kinds of pads. To get to this nice finished burnished look, I end up just running through the gamut of different pads and all that stuff. So this is kind of where a lot of the dirty stuff can happen, and it's a little bit more open air. Cleans up nice and easy out here and doesn't get all my welders and real expensive tools completely soaked.
[04:53] It's not like there's some real expensive nice... they're just Makitas, but they've lasted forever, which is pretty impressive. Like, I mean, I've burned up a bunch of them, but for how much I use them, it's pretty impressive that they're like the entry-level Makitas. These are just good workhorses. I always have used these, my dad always used them before, and it's like... it's mainly the pads is what I've started to get very particular about. They'll make ridiculously expensive pads, like this company Norton makes an incredible one for grinding on stainless because stainless steel is so rock hard that it will chew through your average pad you're just going and buying at the hardware store.
[05:31] This weird looking thing right here is just a simple jig table that I built. I based it off one that my dad had built a long time ago. It's relatively simple. It's just some nice schedule 40 pipe that I welded plumb down on the table. As simple as it looks, I use this table so much in my sculpture work, it's crazy. So like the axles for the balance point on my sculptures, I always have to manipulate those and bend those, and with this being welded together, I can really torque on this table. And then all the way down to real simple things like these are like jigs so I can bend nice radiuses out of metal and make full circles or whatever. And I've got just sort of a variation of all the sizes right here, that these are just common sizes for me and there's a lot more around back. But because this sculpture work is so specialized, a lot of the stuff that I use on the daily is hand-built, like all of it takes a long time. So yeah, some specialty things really help out. But simple looking thing that I use constantly.
[06:42] I sort of took this area which used to be woodworking assembly and then finishing over here, lined the walls with the steel, created kind of just this nice natural light north-facing wall that gives beautiful natural light during the day, and just kind of made this strictly metal working and then created that outdoor space where I could get all the stuff dirty and do all the grinding. I always balance the sculptures indoors, so it's really nice to have a tall ceiling. That was the thing I really needed here that I was... I knew I was going to be missing from that shop. The idea was pop it up off the middle, like off the peak of that roof, balloon frame it up over here, and then get clerestory windows to hopefully let in light over here, achieve that, and then just sort of the flow of being able to come outside here and make all kinds of dirty cuts on my plasma cutter, grinding dust, anything like that. So yeah, I would say the majority is sort of the flow of it, just like any space that you're in, whether it's work, home, whatever, um, yeah, and then just being connected to outside there, so you're not just ruining all your nice tools in here.
[08:02] So this is sort of the balance process. Obviously this is at the end when this one... this piece is already balanced. That's why you can see it moving so fluidly. When I first find the balance point and essentially put it up on this little balancing jig, I never nail the balance right away, so it really rocks back and forth. And then it's just a lot of like fine re-forming. I can't explain the exact process, but to balance it takes a long time. What's funny is like all elements of this work, this sculpture work takes a long time, but you can get stuck for legitimate weeks balancing. This is the process that's honestly it's the most exciting because it's when the sculpture really comes to life. And like I said, it can either go really smooth or give you a hell of a challenge.
[08:58] This is the woodworking side of my shop. The metal working side is amazing, but sometimes art sales get slow. And the reality of my world now is, you know, I do as much art as I can, but when sales are slow, I focused a couple years ago, I got my contractor's license. I do primarily cabinetry work, I do millwork, finish work. So yeah, in here you kind of just have the whole woodworking side, which has been incredible. I've got obviously my big table saw, my big outfeed table, which works as an incredible workbench. I've got my kind of cabinet assembly rolly table. Um, a lot of extra material, all my Festool setup, my clamps, my miter saw, all my hand tools, planers, all that stuff. So, I don't know, this side is kind of just on the daily, really great too, for anywhere from, you know, some clients I work for to my home remodel projects, just anything kind of between this and the metal shop, I feel really fortunate because I can, I don't know, essentially create a lot of stuff in one space, so it's really amazing.
[10:13] So right here we have the old Enco lathe that my father handed down to me once he was totally retired from the sculpture work. This heavy piece of machinery, you know, I mean it's obviously so big and cumbersome, but it does some of the most detailed dainty work, which is ironic for the sculptures. Kind of the real mechanics of the sculpture come down to there's some bearings hidden inside of a housing. And all of the pieces for the bearing assembly that are hidden up in there all have to have very flush cuts and perfect right angles to the bearing axles. So it's not something you can just jump on a chop saw and do. It's really fine cutting, and makes everything perfect. And then from there I also have the big reamers where I ream out to the exact dimension of the bearings. So the size bearing, so everything fits in there nice and snug. So you sort of put everything in there, run reamers through it. You grab the other materials, like sort of some of this stuff and put it in there and you can do really perfect cuts. So this only deals with the inner workings of the sculpture. What this thing does is probably the most important part of the sculpture, but you never really see it. It's all the mechanisms that make it actually be able to move and become a kinetic sculpture.
[11:44] Yeah, so up behind me right here, we have templates of sculptures that I've done in the past. Some of my favorite ones. You know, me coming from the pro surfer world, I always kind of really enjoyed the fact like I'd walk into like my surfboard shaper's room and he had templates of all his favorite boards and stuff just kind of over the past. I wanted to take that idea because I'd love... these are like some of my favorite sculptures, and it's a great thing to have just like any surfboard designs or anything like that. Like you can go lay it down on the table, compare sizes, figure out what worked in the past, where I can kind of get the idea of my favorite shapes and kind of work off of that. Stuff like this just helped me realize like the shape and kind of what inner workings were happening there.
[12:38] This is just your traditional blacksmith hammer that I keep right here on the anvil always because, you know, just run over at any given moment and have to tweak the axle of a sculpture or sort of bend the nose or whatever, just real brute force quick stuff. And then I've got my go-to like ball peen hammer to where I'll be like concaving or convexing part of a sculpture. And then I've got my more like rubber mallet one that is for convexing sculptures, but it'll make a nice even smooth surface. Yeah, this is one that I found, I think I found it at a garage sale, but it's like an old Peter Wright. It's I think it's English, but it's, I don't know, it's definitely a really nice anvil that was a lot of money and luckily it seems like something you only buy once.
[13:33] So this is kind of the staging for my raw material. Honestly, there's kind of a collection of just overstock or whatnot from various projects. Like metal usually comes in 20 foot sections, so you go, I'll haul it in 20s, I cut it down to 10s. Usually I use about 5 feet of something or whatever, or less. And then leftovers I'll put here. So there's, you know, there's everything from aluminum, some aluminum projects. There's a lot of carbon steel, mild steel, there's galvanized stuff. I got a stainless section. A lot of this stuff is just kind of random metal projects, but then a lot of it is kind of the inner workings of sculptures also. There's like some counterweight material. There's the schedule 40 stainless pipe that all the sculptures are mounted on. There's the raw material that I make the ground stakes that they get driven into the ground with. And then back here is the stainless steel that I get sheared up into pieces that make kind of the real structure and shape of the sculptures. So yeah, this is kind of just the my raw material zone that is stored inside out of the weather, which is something I didn't have at my other shop, I had 'em stored outside, so it's really nice to have this indoors now.
[14:48] So another major tool that I use every time, super crucial for a sculpture, whether it's, you know, a real angular geometric sculpture or an organic shaped curvy one, is my plasma cutter. You know, that's a Hypertherm Powermax 45, which is a really nice 240-volt one. Um, obviously there's bigger, probably better ones. And then those can plug into CNC machines or whatever, or plasma tables. But I just kind of do everything by hand because that's what's always worked for me, um, and it was how I was taught. But I have my leads and my torch, everything out here, uh, because I actually do all my cutting outside. Anybody that's used a plasma cutter knows all those little beads, little balls, and the dust that it makes. So I kind of do all my cutting and then my fine-tune grinding sort of in the flow of right here. Yeah, that's a super important tool. Kind of makes the sculptures come to life, the shape of them at least.
[15:51] Well, thank you guys for coming by. Hopefully that was a good little insight how these things are made. It's a pretty backwoods process, but it's kind of the way I like it. Thank you.
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