Watch an Eagle Come to Life: Carving with Spray foam

Welcome to BM Sculptures. I'm Blake and today we're going to be making a bald eagle with a six and a half foot wingspan for my friends and longtime customers nothing but tires. I'll be turning this axe into the beak of the bald eagle so sit back and watch the transformation happen. Once the beak was done it's time to start working on the armature of this eagle. The hardest part of this is all of the weight is going to be resting on these two thin legs. I knew I needed to use some thick steel so here I have some three quarter inch round that I'm going to use as my main support for the legs. Once both legs are bent and welded together it's time to start on the base. Now this is going to be a pretty tricky base because I need the eagle to be detachable from the base. So in order to do that I welded on some square tubing that these rounds fit perfectly into so I can easily slide on and off the eagle. One of the hardest parts of the armature is actually getting the wings in the correct orientation. It's really hard because you actually have to visualize the finished sculpture because you have to know where those wings come out of the body and at what angle. So here I am staring at this angle kind of staring a little more contemplating life choices on this and I think I just made a gigantic turkey. What do you think? Let me know in the comments. All right it's time to turn this big old turkey into a majestic bald eagle. In order to do that I'm using some pink insulation foam with this little hot knife and I will put a link to this in the description if you're interested. It's actually really fun to use but it does get off a lot of toxic smoke so be sure to do it in a ventilated area and wear the proper respiration. It's about this time that I realized that I actually have to wait for the pedestal to be complete in order to put this foam on. I need to actually weld the beak and claws around the pedestal first that way the armature doesn't heat up too much causing all this foam to just melt. Now let's head over to Alex's shop watch this pedestal come to life and watch have imagined them forming around this little perch better than they did. Now it's time to start putting the beak on and then we are done with the armature. Now I could finally get back to putting on this foam and then carving it out into the finished bald eagle form. So sit back and enjoy start putting on this aluminum foil tape everywhere. Now I learned the hard way that fiberglass will absolutely eat away this foam so you have to have some kind of barrier between the fiberglass and the foam and this tape works absolutely fantastic and I will put a link to it in the description. I always get asked why I don't do fiberglassing myself and it's because a couple reasons. One I'm just terrible at it. For some reason I cannot get it right. I always have like bubbled up edges or parts of fiberglass that stick up and just don't want to press down and secondly it's just very messy and smelly to work with so I don't want that around my shop. So it's just super easy for me to send it out and usually these guys are done in like a day or two so it's a win-win for me. Now that everything's prepped it's time to start the tire application and probably my most frequent question is where do you get all these tires? Well here in California and in probably most states now companies actually have to pay to dispose of tires so I hit up every local bike shop I have a couple of good connections around town that just have piles of tires that they're ready and willing to just give me for free because they end up saving a ton of money. So it's quite easy to get these tires but what sucks is actually cutting everything because I have to cut every last shred by hand. I've tried every tool you could think of to cut things I have tried and nothing works better than a good pair of sharp scissors. Once all my tire feathers are cut it's start thinking about the eyes. I head to a local ornamental iron supply they basically supply a lot of fence iron fence parts and they have these balls of all different sizes of steel. The only thing is they aren't shiny at all so here's my little hack on getting these things nice and working on that majestic headdress. Once I'm finished laying down all the tires not only am I extremely tired... see what I did there? But I have thousands of these pesky little narrow crown staples to cover up and I have to hand paint every single one of them. And once those are all covered up I use a special polishing compound to basically make all these used tires look brand spanking new again. Now that the Eagle's almost complete it's time to start finishing up this pedestal and I have a ton of sanding to do to get everything nice and smooth. I round over all the edges and then I bring it into paint. And by bring it into paint I mean I bring it outside and paint it outside myself. I am a newbie sprayer and it really shows. I mean check out my first spray right here. I turned the nozzle literally the wrong direction and just got huge chunks of paint out there. Luckily it was my first one I just wiped it off and then I was ready to go for the real thing. Once I got all the settings dialed in I was actually really happy with how this thing turned out and here you can see that it's uh it's really good for my standards at least. I think it turned out really well. And now it's time to just take off the tape hiding my plaque and it's time for I'm Blake from BM Sculptures. Have a good one.