[PSUBS-MAILIST] Bruce Beasley Acrylic Casting

[hank pronk]

Alan,
When you were on you awesome world tour, did you see a Biber Class submarine.
Hank

From: Alan <alanlindsayjames at yahoo.com>
To: Personal Submersibles General Discussion <personal_submersibles at psubs.org> 
Sent: Friday, October 11, 2013 11:26:39 PM
Subject: [PSUBS-MAILIST] Bruce Beasley Acrylic Casting


While in San Francisco I looked up Bruce Beasley's contact details.
He is one of Americas pre- eminent sculptures & a pioneer in casting thick sectioned acrylic.
I thought I was heading to his gallery but it ended up being his home & studio.
For those who are unfamiliar with the story, Bruce was attracted to acrylic as a sculpting
medium but no one had cast it more than two inches thick. He managed to cast a 4" thick 
model of a proposed 13ft x 4ft art work that he submitted for a competition for a State of California public sculpture. The judges awarded him the prize & finance to built it. Unbeknown
to them the technology to make it didn't exist. 
Du Pont the acrylic manufacturer told Bruce they couldn't offer him technical assistance as he had already exceeded what their chemists could achieve, but would supply him the raw product free.
He observed the formation of bubbles in the polymerising acrylic through windows in an autoclave & discovered how to eliminate them & the cracking, that were the Achilles heel of the process. 2 castings later he created The 13ft x 4ft casting. He said if he hadn't have made it he could have been sued. 
It was at that point that Jerry Stachiw from the U.S. navy approached him to make thick acrylic spheres for deep diving submersibles. There were several failures before success & the price tag on these failures was the equivalent of a new VW.
  Anyway he ushered me in to his living room & chatted away. I have a background in art
so we related well, & he ended up giving me a book which was a retrospective of his sculpture,
including the story of his acrylic sculpture. I think he was quite impressed that someone from N.Z.
knew his story & had tracked him down.
He still has the secrets to manufacturing large castings if anyone wants to purchase the technology.
So again I've been totally spoilt.
Alan





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