Metal Work and Life Mag Archive

The construction industry is going pllllfffuey but we are still building a six story stairway! Today I went to the Brooklyn Navy Yards, once home to the shipyard that built some of the most important ships of the U.S. Navy’s fleets (less the submarines, of course, that’s in Groton, CT). Now the yard is half derelict and half shops of all sorts.

I went to Product and Design, who my company has commissioned to build a six story, custom rolled steel stair tower. They have four enormous spaces in an old factory building where they fabricate everything from connection rings for Leica cameras to custom metal panels for office buildings to punctured tin ceilings at restaurants.

See their website:
http://www.productanddesign.com/index.html

Among other things, they use a plasma cutter (hot gas jets) and water jets to cut metals at a level of precision that was impossible a few decades ago. Apparently, though, laser cutters are more expensive than plasma jets, so they haven’t phased that in yet.

What was most incredible about their production, though is the degree to which they can correctly estimate dimensions. The stair they are building for us is a twisting helix forms (as all curves stairs with squared details inevitable are), and rather than using digital technology to correctly dimension the stair, they can do it correctly by eyeballing (after 1 or 2 tries, the owner told me). It turns out the technology they use to build the twisting-helix stair-rail is much more basic than what they would use to build an HVAC duct (plasma cutter).

Also, Life magazine has just published a large chunk of their photo archive online for free. Check out this Tartar cemetery in Romania (photo taken 1938).