Jeff,
Thank you for your kind words. The plateau was inspired by antiques that are often seen in Tidewater Chesapeake Bay homes, the structural design and the construction came entirely from my background in advanced structures and is probably nothing like an authentic plateau, and the decorations: stylized dolphins, gold stern eagles, crossed yacht club flags in cloisonne and rope rails were to reflect my lifetime in the marine field. The structure is a sort of space frame of sterling tubing and angles because sterling has such poor "physicals" it is a real challenge to make a piece that can stand handling. The individual sections are joined with concealed pins in split versions of the dolphin castings, and the precision necessary to make all sections interchangeable led me to manufacture graphite jigs on which to assemble and solder the components. The bevelled mirror sections are simply mounted atop the space frame which has adjustable screw feet to permit levelling of the entire piece, and alignment of adjacent sections on a real world table. I designed all of the decorations and had wax masters carved by a wax carver ( except the rope master which I made by constructiong a rudimentary rope walk on my dining room table and laying up strands of wax rod )and then investment cast in Sterling silver except for the stern carving from the schooner yacht America which were cast in gold. My original plan was to oversee the project and provide all of the components but have a silversmith do the assembly, but I ended up teaching myself to hard solder and do the assembly becasue my proposed jigging system was so non-traditional that experienced silkversmiths did not want to use it. I wil provide some detail shots after I figure out how to rework my files to downsize the photo files to suit the limits of the posts.
Karl
