This is a statue I was asked to repair. It came to me with no head. That's not technically true. It came to me with the head detached. The head in the picture below is wrapped up in a black blanket to the left of the neck. I wrapped it up to keep it safe because I could tell that the statue meant a lot to the people who asked for it to be repaired and that they'd had it for a very long time. They wanted the head put back on so they didn't have to hold it on with the sturdy system they worked out for keeping it on normally. That worked fine until the javelinas tipped it over, which apparently happened from time to time.
J.W. Fiske. I looked it up. You can look it up also. It's an interesting company with a story that dates back to the 1860s. I don't know how old this particular statue is, not as old as that. They started making garden statues much later. This statue has an odd story and I'm not sure I have the details right because the story was told to me a while ago, and it's not exactly my story to tell anyway. My history with the statue is that I tried to figure out what it was made of so I'd know how to get the head on well enough that the javelinas wouldn't knock it off anymore. I never did figure out what it was made of but I definitely learned I couldn't TIG weld it. It might be cast iron, but I don't think so, I think it's a zinc alloy. Some people call that pot metal. It melts at about 800 degrees Fahrenheit, which sounds like a lot and it is in certain circles but I usually work with processes that are about as hot as the surface of the sun, or 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, so anything I usually do would annihilate this poor old statue.
The statue is hollow all the way through, with thin walls and not a lot of surface where the head contacts the neck. There was metal missing near the break, too, I found out when I ground out all the filler that had been put in over the years.
I decided that if I tried to do something that mechanically relied on the joint at the neck, it was just going to fail again. So I thought maybe I could use the fact that the statue was hollow to my advantage. I chose to make an armature or skeleton that would hold the head in place so that there wouldn't be any stress on the neck joint itself. This involved carefully welding up a structure inside the head that wouldn't be able to shift or pull out. I used little pieces of rebar and welded them together ship-in-a-bottle style until I was convinced that my newly made skull couldn't be pulled out. To these bones inside the head I welded a rebar rod that I could snake down through the body of the statue. To the end of that I welded a threaded rod. It looks creepy but it was solid and it got the threads down where I wanted them.
After that I welded up a ring that would wedge up underneath the skirt of the statue. I wanted something that would come into contact with the statue's base and something large enough and of a sufficient shape that there was no way it could be pulled up any higher than where it landed when I placed it. None of this rebar was in any way attached to the skin of the statue. It's all held in place by geometry alone.
Now you can see where I'm going with this. With the threaded rod captured in this way, I can tighten the nut and it will pull the head tighter down onto the neck because my ship-in-a-bottle structure can't pull down out of the head, it's too big to fit through the neck hole because I welded it together inside the head. This ring can't go up any higher because you can see that it lands on the base. In this way the head could be held in position without the neck joint having to carry any weight at all. The only danger was tightening the nut so hard it would pull the head down too low into the neck. I did that. You can't see it in this photo but what I did is weld rods from this ring below up into the head so that the head couldn't come down any lower than it was supposed to. By doing this the head became completely trapped, unable to move in any direction. When everything looked good I welded this nut in place on the threaded rod so it wouldn't come loose.
You can see the armature is holding the head in exactly the right position. Later I lifted the statue by the head and it was fine, even with the gap at the neck joint.
A lot of metal went missing over the years from this joint, which is another reason I didn't want to rely on trying to join this mechanically.
Needless to say I was very disappointed to see how much metal was gone from this area. It was all filler.
With the head properly alined and the joint as clean as I could get it, I used an unusual low-temperature solder to fill the gap that with the right flux bound well to this unknown base metal. I had to torch heat it though and between that and the flux, it made a lot of clean-up work for me because the statue was originally painted, and of course the original paint would not stand up to the torch.
I made multiple passes over the course of a week to slowly fill in the defects with the low-temperature solder. I had to grind out and resolder to get the continuity and shape I wanted. Through all the grinding the fusion of the filler metal and the base metal seemed strong. It probably would have made a mechanical joint if I wanted to do the job more quickly, but I'd rather rely on the internal steel armature for strength.
I kept at it, grinding and re-soldering to eliminate defects like these little by little.
Eventually I was happy with the continuity of the metal at what used to be the defect. I researched how companies in the 1900s would have finished a zinc alloy statue so that it would look bronze. The statue was originally painted and sold to look like shiny bronze even though pot metal is white.
I put a high-quality primer down first to improve the adhesion of the unusual bronze paint I sourced. I've probably got about eight coats of primer, sanded between each one. I forgot how many. I primed it over and over for about a week.
The bronze paint went on well and if I could have done the whole statue like this it would have been a lot easier. But this wasn't that kind of project. I had to chemically treat the bronze paint to accelerate the aging process so that it would catch up to the decades of wear and exposure on the rest of the statue.
You can see the bronze starting to age here after a couple of days of chemically treating it. I was at this for about two and a half weeks, treating it little by little, over and over.
The repair is less obvious after several treatments and is starting to blend with the patina of the rest of the statue. One option would have been to paint it green. This wasn't that kind of project either. Those aren't really my kinds of projects.
Now you can see the true green patina forming on the painted-on bronze, just like on the original.
This is about where I left it. I think I had another few days in it but it was pretty much like this. The owners were missing it and after all this time I got kind of used to having it around and I didn't particularly feel like letting it go yet but it was time. The character of the repair is consistent with the rest of the statue, it's not exactly the same, but it's not headless anymore and this statue lives outside so the rest is up to the desert elements to carry on the work of blending it all in.
