Friends of Vocational Technical & Agricultural Education,
We are excited to share this incredible story about a Chapter 74 Welding student at Silver Lake Regional High School.
MAVA is proud to share the efforts of Lexi Gresh, in her senior project, a running horse made entirely of horseshoes.
MAVA extends its congratulations to Lexi and her instructor for such an amazing effort.
David
A high school welding student brings a 500-horseshoe sculpture to life
A Massachusetts high school senior transformed donated horseshoes into a life-size horse sculpture
Lexi Gresh, a welding student at Silver Lake Regional High School in Kingston, Mass., sits near her senior project, a running horse made entirely of horseshoes.
Lexi Gresh has been horsing around all year in her welding class at Silver Lake Regional High School in Kingston, Mass., and her instructor Josh Raymond couldn’t be more pleased.
As part of her senior project to demonstrate welding proficiency, Gresh wanted to create a metal sculpture out of horseshoes, something she had seen metal artists do on Pinterest. Thinking back to trips to California to see her godparents and visiting the horse track while she was there, Gresh thought a horse might be a good sculpture subject.
“I always had the utmost confidence in Lexi,” Raymond said. “I was excited to hear that she wanted to take on this challenge.”
Having not created a sculpture like this before, Gresh, Raymond, and Don Arsenault, another teacher in the school’s career and technical education department, decided they needed an example of some sort. A life-size horse model isn’t something that you can easily find on Amazon, so they opted for a small plastic toy horse in a running motion.
Using that as a guide, they sketched the sculpture on a sheet of paper. They then placed the sketch on a projector to create a much larger template—about 10 ft. long and 6 ft. tall. The template comprised small cross-sections that could easily be transferred to plywood, which was then cut out to create a wooden substructure on which the horseshoes could lay as the sculpture was welded together.
“It was kind of like in the automotive world when they make a custom car body. They’ll make a complete wooden buck of the car body,” Raymond said. “We took the same idea, but we made a horse body.”
After spending a month figuring out the support system and the sculpture’s scale, it was time to get to work. By then, they had most of the horseshoes they would need.
“They were actually all donated from local farms and farriers. A bunch of teachers reached out to people they knew, and a librarian who rides horses gave us a lot from her barn,” Gresh said.
Gresh started tacking horseshoes together to form what would become the horse’s midsection, later working her way down the horse’s back and hind legs. She then started on the front legs and moved upwards, creating the chest, neck, and head.
“Everything was tacked on at first because I probably took off twice as many as I put on a lot of the days,” she said. “With everything tacked on, we could just break it off, and we had to do a lot of bending, so sometimes I’d tack it on and have to rebend some places.”
Gresh attaches horseshoes to the rear of her sculpture. A wooden substructure provided the template for the horse.
The bending process to create the mane and the tail from horseshoes required some creativity and patience. Gresh used a forge to heat the horseshoes and then formed them into horsehair-like pieces. It took a couple of days to work about 60 horseshoes into shapes that replicated the hair. Gresh then cut some of the “unraveled” shoes, as she described her work, to make them the right length for the mane.
After significant trial and error, Gresh successfully turned 500 horseshoes into a sculpture of a horse that looked like it was ready to make a dash out of the shop and take on the world. Just one major challenge remained, and a lot of the teachers were asking the question aloud: How was the wooden understructure going to be removed?
The team didn’t forget about that. All along the horse’s head, neck, spine, and rear, Gresh had butted up horseshoes, allowing her the ability to use a cutting wheel to slice the sculpture in half. A plasma torch then was used to cut the internal metal support beams that were connected to the rolling cart base.
With the wooden structure removed, two people held the two sides of the sculpture together, and Gresh tacked the two pieces together. She later added heavy beads in key spots for durability.
“It came out like insanely better than I ever thought it would,” Gresh said. “Obviously, it wasn’t super-easy, but I feel like for a project of this size, we didn’t have a crazy number of bumps in the road.”
The horse sculpture will be on display at some art shows in the area this summer. Raymond said a museum inquired about possibly showcasing the work.
In the meantime, Gresh said she wants to join the local ironworkers program and sharpen her skills while also continuing to dabble with metal sculptures in her off time. There’s no turning back now. The horse has left the shop.
Chapter 74 Vocational Technical & Agricultural Education
LEARNING THAT WORKS FOR MASSACHUSETTS
David J. Ferreira
MAVA Communications Coordinator
DavidFerreira