How come I don't hear anyone talking about the weather around here? Maybe it's like never seeing New Yorkers stop and look up at the Empire State Building. I was beginning to think they were immune to the weather. I tried to go to work today - 8 inches of fluffy wet snow and falling fast and 34 degrees. I was following one other set of tire tracks to the museum. Nothing plowed. No footsteps going into the building. I was thinking, "WHAT?" They handle 40 below without blinking, but a little bit of snow paralyzes the town? Then I saw a picture of cute painted faces on colored eggs all wearing painted masks.  OH. DUH!

So here I am at the apartment again. Trying to figure out how to work the washing machine. Finally got it to start but it appears locked into delicates/hand-washables. I can't tell it did any more than turn very slowly in alternating directions about 10 times. Oh well, nothing was very dirty anyways. Thought I would do a load of everything I brought as long as I was stuck in the apartment today. It had been a week of cloudy overcast with that frozen fog falling almost every day in minute amounts. No chance of seeing the sky-lights all week.

Monday took off as a notorious classic Monday. My main helper didn't get in till late. My other helper was already there at 8:00 AM working on painting consolidant on one last complicated bone that hadn't been coated yet, the cervical vertebral block, which is the 7 neck bones fused into one heavy (39.4 pounds), interesting chunk of bone. It looks as if those 7 bones got too hot and sort of melted into one another and stuck. 

 

When Aren got in and settled, we started building the rib cage jig out of 2 x lumber. This is essentially a stiff centerpiece that is suspended down the middle of the skeleton building cart, below the vertebrae. One crosspiece board is fastened to the cart for each pair of ribs. Kind of like a giant flattened 26-legged centipede. The first pair of ribs is big and heavy, and they attach to a weird looking bone that serves as the sternum. Nothing obvious that tells us exactly where that first pair of ribs attaches to the sternum, or at what angle, or where that whole assembly would attach to the vertebrae. The first set of vertebrae the assembly should attach to, has a long thin finger of bone that wraps around almost to the front of the cervical block. The first pair of ribs has a big curved flattened articular surface with a banana sized and shaped articular end. How a golf ball-sized end of the first rib vertebrae would match up to the side of a curved banana shape, defied normal bone building logic. We spent a couple hours on that puzzle and finally decided to just tie it all together with some internal pins and suspend it with zip ties till we had a few more ribs on and hope for some  better clues. The zip ties kept breaking or slipping apart (I thought these were the things they use for handcuffs). We switched to baling wire. Went to the second pair of ribs and it was the reverse. The rib had a long reaching finger of bone and the articular surface on the second vertebrae also had a long finger of bone reaching around the cervical block But they didn't look like they could touch. By the end of the day when Aren left, we had a total of 4 ribs tied in place and suspended in the approximate location they might go, but nothing made sense about how or where they connected.

Marissa had been sorting and laying out finger bones. The finger bones connect to the wrist bones - except in some whales like this one. The wrist bones connect to the arm bones (except in some whales like this one). In this whale, the ends of the arm-bones (radius and ulna) had been sawed off and went with the flippers as some kind of gourmet gift to the whaling captains. We decided to rebuild the ends of those two bones. I had fashioned a mold that worked well; a layer of thin ethyl foam wrapped tightly around the perimeter of the bone ends (that extended up far enough to cover some all-thread I used as rebar), then poured in the water putty mix that I use as concrete to replace the missing 3 or 4 inches of bone. 

 

The second set of those arm bones had been 3-D printed as mirror images in plastic with some foam inside to stiffen it some. The super artists (Gail and Marika) had painted these such that they were realistic enough that I had to tap them or move them each time to see if they were the real bones or the fake ones. The fake ones are as light as the real ones are heavy. More than once I almost lost a fake one when I picked it up expecting it to be almost concrete heavy, but it was Styrofoam light instead.

 

The 3-D printed bones came from the printing company as white, feather-weight plastic bones. The seams where the two halves had been glued together needed to be sanded first, then wiped in solvent to remove the plastic residue, painted with a primer paint of acrylic house paint, then painted with artists acrylic paint using natural sea sponges, then covered with a clear UV protective layer of paint, then another layer of clear to dull the shine. A lot of work and talent went into getting them to that point.

 

Since the 3-D printed plastic bones were also missing their tops, they were going to receive the same treatment used on the real bones. I put my bone textured ethyl-foam mold around the radius bone and tightened it in place with a couple zip-ties, real tight. Stood it up in my box and mixed an entire 4 pound can of water putty to a barely flowing consistency, poured and scraped the gloop into my mold and bumped the box and  bone, lightly on the floor several times to compact the gloop. HORRORS!! The mold and zip-tie slipped down the smooth painted plastic bone! Not a problem except the bone gets smaller in diameter further down, so the gloop managed to flow under the zip-tie and was now halfway down the sides of the plastic bone. This water-putty appears to stick real well to those plastic bones and gets much harder than normal plaster. So into the bathroom to pour it all into the trashcan and wash the wet gloop off the bone. It came off fine (whew!) ... along with some of fresh water-based paint products that were barely dry, leaving some of the painted bone looking like it had been bleached in the sun longer than any of the other bones. That was my  Monday. 

Tuesday, I confessed to Aren and to the artists that I ruined their bone. They looked at it and said it's fine. We'll touch that up with our next round of bone painting.

After pondering the quandary of the weird ribs in the middle of the night (hey, that's when some of us bone builders have our best ideas), I came up with a couple ideas. One was to start at the back, where the ribs seemed more normal and familiar and work forward. The other idea was to use wire to hold the end of each rib up. Moving forward, one pair of ribs at a time, allowed us to see the progression from almost normal (in the formation of the rib cage) to radically weird, one step at a time. Like reverse engineering for dummies. We wired the tops in place and rubber-banded the bottom to the jig but the ribs, not being pinned to the vertebrae, wanted to fall to one side or the other, creating a domino effect of twisting ribs. By the end of the day we had 2/3 of the ribs sort of in place, tied, wired, rubber-banded, blocked with wood shims, whatever it took to hold it there. It looked like Rube Goldberg had been helping, or maybe we were making an advanced ropes course for mice. Another night of pondering led to an epiphany of tying wood lathe or flexible  thin  plastic water pipe pieces along the outside of the rib-cage in two separated  rows and binding each rib to these in 2 places with surveyor's string and a special rib-builders knot. Now these independent, uncooperative bad boys, have been conscripted into a choreographed team of well behaved ribs. They can do what they need to as long as they do it all  together and stay in a line. All the ropes, guidelines, rubber-bands, and wedges have been removed and the ribs have been happy and cooperative ever since.

 

The ribs are looking good and we are waiting for the metal workers to bring us some metal pieces. The flippers now have finger bones all lined up, assembled and ready to attach, thanks to Marissa. The finger bones all have a hole drilled to move rod into them as soon as the painting of the big bones gets finished. Hoping to get some welding delivered next week.

Karl, the overseer, manager, number cruncher, timeline maker, budget guy, contractor organizer  of this project, has been losing sleep over the stainless steel metal pieces that are being fabricated. The desire was to have all the metal a dull gray color. Some of it is now shiny, some dull, some half and half. A lot of it has gray  writing all down the length of one side or the other. The welders and engineers and machinists kind of shrug and didn't have any good ideas of how to get it all looking the same. I asked, "Doesn't anybody do sandblasting in town?" The collective they didn't know but suggested one place. Karl  was  going to check that out. He said something like, "You'd think some kind of acetone or paint remover would take off that lettering. Turns out we have some acetone in here. While they were still debating where to go to get an even, dull finish, I wiped a piece of steel with an acetone dampened cloth and was shocked. It was like erasing words off a whiteboard. They still needed to find a place to sandblast the shiny and welded pieces when they get done.

That evening I ventured into a bar-type eatery, The Red Fox. It looks like one of those places that in it's day, one had to feel your way through the smoke to find a place to sit. Now it has a dining room at one end and a bar in the middle and probably pool tables at the other end. But it had a pizza menu and lots of hamburger,/sandwich/bar-food options. The waitresses wore masks, the dining area was almost empty, the food was good and Margarita was my dinner date. Life is better.

The project is making noises like mid-May or June for lifting and unveiling the whale skeleton. It is now early April. I'm making noises like I will be done bone building in 2 weeks with everything I can do here. Karl is talking about how nice springtime in Fairbanks is, when the switch is flipped to melt mode. The forecast is saying -11  to -16 most nights this week. And I'm saying as soon as I am done bone building I'm heading back to Homer and will return a day or two before the skeleton is hung, to help with the move and lift. They are still waiting for a few plastic bones and most of the welding for the bone cradles hasn't even been started yet.