We take a lot of pride in making connections to a wide range folks in the region.  Because we have expertise in art, science, and engineering, we can work on projects from a variety of different fields.  A nice example of this is a current project that we are working on for the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site in Hyde Park, NY.  They approached an art restoration company several years ago about restoring a sculpture that has been sitting by the pool at Val-Kill for decades.  You can see it in this picture from the 1940’s.  The historic site also wanted to make copy of the sculpture so they could put the original inside to protect it from further weather damage.  One of the employees of the restoration company was New Paltz Digital Design and Fabrication alumna Caryn Bylot, who got us involved in making the copy.  Because of the historical and cultural importance of Eleanor Roosevelt, it was a real privilege to have a chance to contribute, even in a small way, to the maintenance of the Val-Kill site.

3D printed head of Pool Boy Statue.

Making an accurate copy of the sculpture is a multi-step process.  First it needs to be scanned to get a good digital copy.  We referred the personnel at the historic site to an excellent local scanning artist.  Our part was 3D printing the sculpture in as few pieces as possible to use as a positive to take a mold from.  For making the mold and casting the sculpture out of concrete (to replicate the original), we referred the historic site to Czinkota Studios in Gardiner, NY.  Czinkota does custom fabrication for branding, events, museums, and the theater.  We’ve worked with them on a number of projects over the past 6 or 7 years and they do really amazing work.

We have just finished printing the copy of the statue.  First, we printed the head and then Czinkota did a test mold to make sure their copy would be similar to the original.  Given the size of the statue, we printed it on our Stratasys Fortus 400MC printer in PC/ABS.  With its 14″x16″x16″ build volume, we were able to print the statue in just three pieces, well, 4 including the head.  The largest piece of the statue is the single longest build we have ever done on the Fortus.  It took 105 hours.  I can tell you that we sweated bullets every time a thunderstorm rolled through because if the power went out for more than a minute, we would have to start over.  Thanks to our friends at Central Hudson, we had 0 glitches and the print came out beautifully.  The pictures show the detail captured by the printer, but I think the most impressive aspect is how well the three pieces fit together.  Each of those builds was thousands of layers and the pieces fit together essentially seamlessly.  The precision of the Fortus 400 is rated at 0.005″.  This is, of course, important in many industrial applications, but it’s a real benefit in art reproduction as well!  We will update this as this project continues.

Rest of statue in pieces

Rest of statue assembled