California design company, Delphi Productions, faced a daunting challenge; replicate 4 of the 6 men featured in Rodin’s famous bronze statue Burghers of Calais in less than a month for Stanford University.  The replicas needed to be lightweight, durable and believable.  Instead of turning the project down, Delphi turned to TAA member 3D Custom Foam for help.

3D Custom Foam accepted the project, built the pieces and delivered them several days ahead of schedule.  “We’re set up for fast turn around time” said company Vice President John Mallory, “This was a challenging project, but we enjoy fabricating items that have a higher degree of difficulty.  The budget did not support us flying out to Stanford to 3D laser scan the actual sculptures on campus, so we scanned small maquettes of the sculpture to obtain our 3D computer data". 

The Burnaby, B.C. based company converted their scanned data into  3D CNC code so the many pieces could be cut from expanded polystyrene foam by CNC router bits.  The machined foam pieces were assembled and then fine tuned by hand.  Once complete, the foam sculptures were sprayed with poly urea hard coat to provide strength, durability and texture.  The coating was then primed and faux bronzed. The entire process took just under three weeks.

David Salinger of Delphi Productions was very pleased with the replicas and plans to contact 3D Custom Foam again for future projects.