Lakeland PBS presents Common Ground brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Production funding for Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community.

Member FDIC.

Closed captioning is made possible by the Bemidji Regional Airport serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, more information is available at bemidjiairport.org.

[Music] [Music] Welcome to Common Ground.

I'm Producer/Director Randy Cadwell.

I'm standing next to a piece of art here in downtown Bemidji made by New York Mills metal sculptor Timothy Cassidy.

Today we feature Tim as he takes pieces from an old combine to make a 12 foot wind controlled piece of art.

I was able to follow him through this tall project.

[Music] [Music] [Music] I'm Tim Cassidy.

I'm from rural New York Mills, Minnesota.

I'm an abstract industrial iron sculptor.

Back in March of 2022 I was looking around at some of my materials and I had an idea of a sculpture that I wanted to make.

It'll end up being my first kinetic piece.

I've got some combine parts that I got from a coworker.

I kind of wanted to use most if not all of those parts in a particular sculpture.

So, this being the base and going up and then this part here would actually with this welded to it is going to spin around with the wind.

When I have a drawing that I like of a sculpture I a lot of times will just build it proportionally to the drawing but this is kind of a different piece for me and it's got moving parts and I'm going to be sketching and I may even build a model or two as I go.

It's going to be more of a involved process for me.

Here's part of an antenna that was on the house years ago.

It ended up coming down and I saved it.

Hopefully, part of this I can use on that piece I'm working on to get up off the base.

The part that's going to spin will be mounted to this.

There we go.

I'm thinking of a like a dinosaur type of name for it "Stegga" something probably but anyway so this is one part of the base, it's a five piece base and this piece has been ground and cut also and so it is ready for the other four pieces and actually with this piece, now this is part of the base and I will be grinding on this piece here today.

So, the idea is to get these parts close at this point cuz it's kind of still in the rough stage and then I'll, when I get them all ready then I'll find tune them to make them fit together the way I want.

My family and I moved up here to New York Mills back in 2005.

We came from the Cities, St. Paul area but when I got up here to rural New York Mills anywhere you go there's farm implements and in the woods and such and people are willing to donate if you help them clean up and all that and so I just have accumulated more and more over the years and it's actually a great source of material for iron sculptings.

Some of the parts from some of the machinery kind of have like a plate stegosaurus plate look to them and so I started playing around with that idea with some of my pieces.

I'm working on a I call it my farm machinery series of sculptures so it's like old outdated implements, farm implements that are somehow mixed with a some type of an extinct creature.

I was intrigued to make this model after doing some sketching for this particular sculpture I want to build and the reason I built this, it's built out of cardboard was to get an idea of so from the drawings, I wanted to get an idea of how this is going to look in three-dimensional space and I wanted to know the width of the base versus the height of the sculpture.

I couldn't figure it out from the drawings so I wanted to make a model that I could then measure off of and build proportionally when I get to the sculpting of it.

I'm pleased with the bottom part and I'm definitely going to build off of that proportionally.

I mean, I like this top part but I'm, it's not set in stone that I'm going to make it exactly like this once I get to that part cuz I've got a bunch of drawings that all have different looks to them so even with drawings, you know, sometimes it'll change when I get to a certain point of the piece that I'm working on.

So, that's kind of the fun, one of the fun parts of building this stuff is just seeing how it evolves through the process of making it.

It is quite a process that, you know, I wouldn't be able to whip this out in steel, you know, 15 ft. tall in one day.

It takes several days to make this thing.

So, as I'm thinking about it I sometimes can change it or not.

You know, I have a full-time job so I can't be out here every day.

I want to be eventually, so that's the goal.

I had roughly cut these combine parts out so that they would fit on some type of a structure that I could weld them to and so now what I did after I made my maquette, my model I was able to visualize for myself what type of a structure I need for these to weld to and so I got this built up.

So, I've got these labeled 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 corresponding to the parts and how they fit up to each side and where I wanted them.

I made a 2 foot by 2 foot by 2 foot square.

There's a couple of different angles there to make it so it's kind of a star pattern is what I was going for.

Math was a big part of it.

So, I can get number one tack done now.

Proportional equations is what I work with.

So, now I would continue putting on the other three parts and then once they're all on just if I need to make any minor adjustments I would and then after that I would weld it all up solid.

And now I have all the pieces attached, tacked and welded together.

This is actually what this piece will look like and then I'll be building up from here.

So, the next part I'll be working on for this sculpture is the tower section here and I've got that laid out on the table and I made a just an easy jig for it with angle iron and a piece of tubing so that it's 2 ft. x 2 ft. on the base all the way around and then it came out to be 15 inches square on the top.

I've got a couple more pieces I need to cut for that.

[Music] So, these sheet metal parts they're actually old fuel barrels that I've collected over the years and so I'm cutting them out of that and then flattening it and then I'll just take and clamp this to the piece.

Now this thing is starting to get more exciting because it's starting to take shape and almost like lift up, you know, I mean the base was fun to work on too however it was meticulous work and time consuming but I had to do it that way to get it to the point where it is right now and I'm very happy with the way it looks so and it's very rigid.

Last time I had the frame on here but since then I've welded it to the base and then I've added the fifth leg and the diagonal supports for it.

I've got two more panels that are ready to tack weld onto here and then I can actually plug weld what's on here.

So, this particular piece is a cleaning fan off of a combine that'll be part of the sculpture that I'm working on.

This will be the part that is going to move in the wind hopefully.

The only thing is I'm going to mainly use the inner workings, the part that goes around and everything else I'll have to modify to make smaller to fit on top of the structure that I'm building for the sculpture.

I've completed putting the steel sheets on all the way around the tower section of this part of the sculpture and also have welded the entire outside of this.

I did a drawing back in June and I really after thinking about it and looking at all the drawings I've done for the upper part of the windmill sculpture I really did end up liking this one the best, so this is what I'm going to go with as shapes for the top of my windmill.

I also did the math on this so I know how big to make each piece, how tall and wide so that'll help me in drawing these pieces out.

I'm going to measure the height and the width of these last two and then I'll freehand draw the shape inside of that.

What I've done now is I've cut this part off of this part and I will even, I've marked these out and I will cut more of this apart so that I can make this shape here because this is the template of the top of the base part of my sculpture.

So, I want to use this as the edging to fit over the top of my sculpture.

So, cutting apart the frame of that fan will now allow me to rebuild it with this template so that it'll fit on top of that sculpture.

So, the seams will be welded back together again.

I still have to cut these parts and then we'll get it all welded back up together.

This piece of galvanized, I'll call it round tube pipe whatever you want to call it really thin walled, I think it's from an old augur system for farm use supporting all of these fins that I've cut out and that'll be part of the whole assembly that spins around in the wind.

It's roughly 10 ft long and what I needed to do was cut it about every foot so that I can get a little bit of an arc in it so it'll be something like this and I'll have to I'll weld all the seams back together but it'll have a bit of an arc to it like my model shows and the way that I want to get these to fit on here, because it's not just a round cut it's a kind of an oval cut I just have this propped up at the right dimension off the floor, the fin and then I would take a piece of soap stone and just trace around here and get this oval shape.

It won't be a straight round cut here, it's I've got to have it at that angle and that and then I use the shape of the pipe to trace onto there to get a close cut of how it's going to fit and then I'll shape it more with the grinder in spots that I need to.

So, I got to thinking as I was making the actual part that resembles this model is it really going to spin so I had to do a test and so I found a piece of aluminum pipe that fits this pretty good not real snug so, hopefully it'll spin.

So, I think it's going to work hopefully.

The morning of January 14th was exciting for me, laying in bed at 3:00 a.m.

I was thinking about this sculpture because I had worked on the actual framework the day before and screwed it up twice so but I got all the parts cut for a third attempt and they were all just laying in my shop.

So, I wake up at 3:00 a.m. and I had this, I'll call it an epiphany but it was this I could see all the parts that I needed to make to finish this sculpture.

So, I got out of bed quick and I grabbed my journal and and I wrote, I drew everything up that I needed to make for the sculpture to be complete and then also wrote some notes on what to do, what to weld, what to trim and all of this stuff so as of this these two drawings and these notes I now know how to finish the sculpture.

So, this is the third attempt at making the frame that'll sit on top of the base.

The first frame I cut it was really thin gauge.

It was the part that went around this original fan off the combine so I decided not to use those parts once I had them all cut out of course and then I tried to make another angle frame similar to this.

I was thinking to build them at a 90° and remember that the base is actually all tapered so I was able to cut new pieces and then I adjusted them to a 4° pitch.

They're all pitched in at a 4°, tacked that together and then went and test fitted and it fit.

So, third time was a charm on this.

So, this mechanism will be the spinning part of the sculpture and it'll be right inside of this on the actual sculpture and today I've got a piece of steel cut and ready to roll for this cylinder part.

So, I finis,hed cutting all of the radiused parts of these let's call them fins on the bottom of all of them and fitted them onto here and I also formed this galvanized tube round tube and then welded the seams on them so it kept that radius shape that I was looking for and these I've partially welded on.

They're not completely welded but I just wanted to get an idea of the, you know, get the spacing right and then how they're going to sit on here structurally.

So, I noticed that some of these don't have a vertical part on them and so they flop around and this, I don't I think this will bend outside when a wind hits it so but here I had a couple that had the vertical stiffener and that's exactly what I'm looking for.

So, the ones that don't, I cut some pieces from other parts of the combine, angle pieces that I will weld on to these on the backside and that'll stiffen it right up to the galvanized pipe form.

It was open on both ends.

It kind of looked unfinished at that point and I didn't want birds flying in there and building nests and such so I decided to cap them, just used some sheet metal from the combine, heated it up and hammered them.

I got this all bent up and I welded the seam right here, welded the seam inside and out just to make sure that it holds and then I cut a piece of 1/8 inch thick steel circular for the top and welded that together, made sure it was as round as I could get it and then drilled hole in the center and several holes around the top that'll match up to this part for plug welding it to that.

I modified this piece that came right off the combine that fan I had to cut here and it was about almost a 5 inch chunk that I had to cut off of this and then shrink it down and reweld it together and I used angles clamped to both sides when I welded to make sure it was straight, in line and reduce these because they were longer and this was out further so I cut that.

These were out further so I had to bend them in and weld, just to make sure that none of this hardware falls out, I tack welded each each bolt and nut assembly too.

I'm kind of trying to test fit this just to see exactly how it's going to balance on there and then where I'm going to need to weld once it is on there and if I have to do any more grinding.

Let me lower it a little, whoa it wants to spin.

It really wants to spin.

So, that's good.

So, that's kind of what we're looking at here, right there abouts.

Right about there I think.

[Music] [Music] [Music] It's good to see it up top like that.

This has been a long project, there we go.

I installed it on my property on a level spot.

I've been watching it now for a little while, month or two.

I thought actually it would spin a little bit faster with the wind but it'll go and then kind of stop and go, you know, once in a while it'll go all the way around but so it's a little different than I expected.

It feels like a big gentle giant basically, you know, just kind of hanging out in the breeze.

I like it.

Thank you for watching Common Ground.

If you have an idea for a Lakeland PBS production in north central Minnesota email us at legacy@lptv.org or call 1-800-202-0922.

To watch Lakeland PBS productions online visit lptv.org or download the free PBS app.

Production funding for Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji continuing their second century of service to the community.

Member FDIC.

Closed captioning is made possible by the Bemdiji Regional Airport, serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

More information is available at bemidjiairport.org.

Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by the vote of the people November 4th, 2008.