Aluminum Lockheed Lounge Chair by Marc Newson

Marc Newson was born in Sydney, Australia. He is a successful industrial designer who works in aircraft design, product design, furniture design, jewellery and clothing. He incorporates a design style known as biomorphism to his various designs. This style uses smooth flowing lines, translucency, transparency and tends to have an absence of sharp edges.

Marc Newson’s aesthetic vision and uncompromising originality has won him international acclaim. He has had solo exhibitions at major museums and galleries around the world and holds adjunct professorships in design at Australia and Hong Kong universities.

Today's post on aluminium is about Newson break-through piece, the 1986 Lockheed Lounge Chair, the realization of "a fluid metallic form, like a giant blob of mercury" based "loosely, very loosely" on the 18th century chaises longue he had seen in reproductions of French paintings. Newson made it himself in "a couple of miserable months" of hammering hundreds of aluminium panels on to an home-made fibreglass mould. After the Lockheed Lounge was exhibited at a Sydney gallery, photographs of it appeared in magazines all over the world.

And all thanks to aluminum.

[Via Design Museum]

Blo Void Chair by Ron Arad

Ron Arad is an Israeli industrial designer, artist and architect. He attended the Bezalel Academy of Art and the Architectural Association in London. He was head of Design Products Department at the Royal College of Art until 2009. Arad's works are often worked into distinctive biomorphic shapes and are created from many different materials.

Today we show you the Blo Void Chair a polished and anodized aluminum chair design by Ron. It first apparition on market was in 2006 and the first prototype was sold in a price of 70,000 dollars. It is consider a contemporary design and it was made all of aluminum.

Great aesthetics design, ¿doesn´t it? and ¿what about funcionality? Well, until I sit there i'll give you my opinion.

Aluminum Profiles

Hi, here i let you with an aluminum manufacturing video, it is in spanish but i take my time to translate it for you. It’s very interesting understand how aluminum products that surround us are manufacture. So, I hope to enjoy this video and learn a lot from it.

The ingots are place in the charger and then the chains carry the ingot into the pusher area while two hydraulic arms load the slug in the center of the oven. The pusher transport ingots into the furnace where they are heater to a temperature of 400 C, then when the ingot is out of the oven a weed cut it into pieces called billets that are delivered to the extrusion press, the diameter of the billet can be load depending on the type of press. As bigger is the diameter of the billet, bigger the force that needs the hydraulic press to mantain the same mechanical specific extrussion pressure while higher is the profile section that can be extrude. This means that the type of press depends of the final product that you want to produce. The press has a pair of hydraulic pumps that drive the spindle through a hydraulic cylinder; the force applied on the billet rod makes the material flow across the matrix where it gets its final form. At exit, the profile is cooled by water or air to achieve the desired metallurgical properties; the puller holds the profile and guides ir along the output table. Once the extrusion is finish while charging the following billet into the press, the extrude billet is cut, it is evacuated from exit and remains a time on the cooling table before ir is drawn through the traction bench eliminating the internal tensions straightening of the material and profile, then profiles are cut to size and are places in baskets by hand or machines, the baskets passed through the furnace of maturity where mechanical strenght is increased by heat treatment. Finally the profiles are packed for its delivery to the final customer.

At this blogspot we love all the aluminum possibilities. Nice, doesn´t?

[Via Youtube]

Aluminum Violin History

Aluminium Violin, 1932

Instrument Company
Historial Society of Western Pennsylvania

Alfred Springer patented an aluminum violin in 1891 which was well received and played to critical acclaim both in the US and abroad. The Springer Violin was machined from aluminum with top, back and sides of metal; only the neck and fittings were wood. In 1894 the John Church Company announced they were working on an Aluminum violin of their own, built by the Imperial Company, Church's small instrument manufacturing arm. In 1910 Edgar l'Allemand a WI violin maker, revived the interest in aluminum violins, but on a small, handmade scale. A notice in the December, 1914 Music Trades magazine stated that William Koelpin had made an aluminum violin while in the process of testing an aluminum solder he invented. Aluminum bass violins were made and sold in the 1930s & 40s and The Boston Pops orchestra had one for many years.

In fact we can conclude that aluminum castings have many possibilities for development, in this case the music industry was able to improve important innovations on sound across the creation of an aluminum violin, breaking with past that centered all of music instruments on wood.

Aluminum rules! That's why you should use it.

[Via Michael I. Holmes]

Permanente mold

At foundry instead of using sand a metal is used as a mold, typically cast iron is used as the mold material and the cores are made from metal or sand. Cavity surfaces are coated with a thin layer of heat resistant material such as clay or sodium silicate. The molds are pre-heated before the metal is poured into the cavity and care has to be taken to ensure proper thermal balance by using external water cooling or appropriate radiation techniques.

Permanent mold castings, while not as flexible as sand castings in allowing the use of different patterns, lower the cost of producing a parta, at a production run of a thousand or more parts permanent mold castings produce a lower piece cost part.

(via Efunda)

sand casting

There are two kinds of molding in sand casting, one is commonly known as green sand casting and the other is known as air set sand castings. Both methods work by packing the mixture around a master patter for forming the mold cavity, the pattern is removed from the cavity and the final mold is formed by two parts generally called the cope and drag. The molten aluminum is poured then into de mold, when its time the sand mold is destroyed, obtaining like this the aluminum product in its first phase.

via aluminum foundry's blog

Alfred University’s School of Art & Design are pouring their hearts into helping Haiti

Check out this interesting project, via Alfred University News:

"

Students in Alfred University’s School of Art & Design are pouring their hearts into helping Haiti in very hands-on way.

When they learned the father of a fellow student was in Haiti Jan. 12 when an earthquake leveled the capital, killed more than 100,000 people and injured many hundreds of thousands more, the Foundry Guild organized a “Pour for Haiti” event for 2-8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 6, at the National Casting Centre.

The event is open to the public; participants will have an opportunity to make their own “relief sculpture “ – creating a relief mold in their own unique designs, which will then be cast in metal. Adults and children with supervision may participate in return for a $10 donation for each sculpture created.

Coral Lambert, sculpture professor in the School of Art & Design at Alfred University, said the sculptures will be cast in molten aluminum the day of the pour and participants will be able to take them home with them that day.

The National Casting Centre at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University is located on State Route 244 just north of the Alfred University campus; it offers a unique facility for melting metals that few other art schools have.

Other students in AU’s School of Art & Design are participating in the benefit as well; they are donating art work for a silent auction, with bidding to close at 7:30 p.m. and winners to be announced after that. All proceeds from the sale of the artwork will also be donated to the Haitian relief efforts chosen by the students.

The Foundry Guild, which is a student club, will be selling “its famous Guild cheese sandwiches” as well as other snacks and beverages. Marshmallows for toasting will also be available.

To pre-order a sand block to carve and cast for a “relief sculpture,” email Scott Lamont at sdl4@alfred.edu..............

Additional information may be obtained by contacting Prof. Lambert at lambertc@alfred.edu......... or the Foundry Guild President Sharie Willey at willey@alfred.edu............ You may also call the Foundry at 607.587.4727.

"

For more information about Haiti visit the NYT website.

For more information about aluminum castings visit Torrey Foundry