I feel like I've just given birth,LOL,though the gestation period was rather short (two weeks).
Some great new clients in L.A. who run a studio called"Almost Human",that make monsters and other animatronic devices for movies and television commissioned me to make a heavy industrial conference table with "some added attraction",but they also needed it by the 9th for some important meeting...
After frenetic email exchanges,I persuaded them that what they needed was an organic feature to really make this piece memorable. The model was a gray whale vertebrae. The parts for the spine are mostly forged with the trip hammer,and each individual vertebrae slides over a square tube that was rolled to an appropriate arch so that in the end use the "wing sections" of these vertebrae will not obstruct the knees of anyone drawing their chair close up to the table. Remember;"Form Follows Function",so it has to WORK as a conference table first before any aesthetic embellishment is imposed upon the design...They will have a 4' x 9' piece of thick glass on the top. The dorsal sections of the vertebrae are graduated in size so as to form a nearly parallel ridge just beneath the glass.
I started the work on December 23rd and completed it on January 4th.
All welded and forged steel -33"wide by 86"long by 30" high.