Designing the Aerial Heart
Gavin Smith
Designing and building the Aerial Love Heart takes a good amount of time, hard work and effort.
After we get the dimensions right of the sizes, curves and other details, we then select the materials, tubular, solid, stainless steel or mild steel. The process is fairly straight forward, rolling the steel with complex curves, fitting the reinforcing for the welded joints and points of attachment for the rigging or rope, preparing for welding, welding, cleaning up, painting or polishing, splicing the ropes and dressing them.
The steel rolling is quite complex since we are dealing with 2 converging radius curves on the sides of the love heart, that means lots of maths and careful measurements to ensure repeatability when making the left and right sides of the heart. Once the steel is rolled we cut and fit the pieces together, reinforce the joints which is our trademark safety feature, where a welded joint can fail we always design it with a mechanical redundancy feature. Next step is the welding, the challenge is to get the heat in to the welds that provides good penetration and ensures safe and strong welds. After this is the clean up, painting, or polishing if stainless steel, splicing the ropes to the bar is required and then covering them with a durable nylon, padding, sewing and seizing the ropes.
The aerial love heart can be built in many shapes, shapes and features, so if you have any plans to build one drop us a line and tell us your requirements.
