The giant tree for the Jade City mini golf at NEB’s is almost painted. Becke will do the last of the glazes on the lower roots tomorrow, making the feature ready to roll out of the shop the day after. It turned out very cool. The smallest branches with the leaves will be installed just before we put it into the truck that will take it to Ontario in another month or two. In the meantime we’ll enjoy the tree each time we walk by.
Out in the sunshine!
This morning we added sculpting epoxy to the branch tips to finish off the sculpting of the tree. Then it was time to pull it out of the shop and into the sunshine to make room for more new projects in the shop. The tree was thoroughly brushed down to remove the concrete crumbles and dusted with compressed air to make it ready for paint next week after it properly cures. The magical tree looked even better in the natural light of day!
Barking up the right tree
Anyone who has worked with concrete quickly learns that upside down work is tricky. Troweling curved and upside down surfaces ramps up the difficulty even more. Working at the end of your reach, in a tight space as you do it makes it even trickier. Sculpting trees is all of the above. We anticipated that sculpting the bark on the tree would take two days. With three of us troweling on the concrete mix and sculpting as it began to cure things went well. Grant managed to keep up with blending the perfect mix of fibreglass reinforced concrete. We started at the top and by noon we were more than half way down the trunk. We decided to keep going, working through lunch to complete the application of the concrete. A couple of hours later we had finished the sculpting. It’s a wonderfully fun tree!
