The ‘Jesus job’—A highly memorable laser cutting project

Jesus wall art designed, fabricated, and installed by Barnes MetalCrafters..
Photo courtesy of Barnes MetalCrafters.

We’ve had our share of odd jobs, and some for the record books. Some are jobs you don’t really want to do, but you do them anyway. If you got all the veterans in the shop together, we could go down memory lane and tell stories for hours, often giving detailed information of work that is stuck in our heads and must be shared.

I’m pretty sure such a job just come through the shop. It was in the form of Jesus, and we were going to deliver him to the local church. I don’t want to give this story away, but I’m pretty sure you’ve got the gist of it.

One of our frequent customers told one of his clients that he knew a guy who could produce some artwork out of metal. He relayed the message to me and asked if it was PL if he passed my name on. I, of course, agreed and didn’t think much about it. Conversations like that are quick, and you often forget about them until they come to the table.

That day came, and I received a phone call from a nice, elderly woman, who said her husband had recently passed away. I could tell in her voice that he was a special man, and I gave her my sincere condolences. She went on to tell me about this large statue of Jesus that she had seen and wanted to know if I could make one for her local church. We talked about it for a few minutes and I asked her if she had a picture of it that she could send to me. She said, “Yes,” and I asked her if she could email or text it to me. Her response was priceless. She told me she was too old to learn that kind of stuff, because she didn’t want to damage her brain.

We both had a little chuckle, and she said that she would get her daughter to send it to me. She immediately began asking about how much it would cost, and I told her that I had no clue, because I really didn’t know what she wanted. Taking “walk-ins” over the phone is often difficult, but I was happy to accept a challenge.

I received a huge picture of Jesus kneeling and praying. It looked very cool, but the quality of the image wasn’t the best. I asked if she could get me something a little better, and I could come up with something.

A few weeks passed, and a visitor came to the shop. It was the lady I spoke with on the phone, and she had some large pictures for me. She wanted the Jesus to be around 10 feet wide. My dad and I discussed the job for a few minutes and he gave her a price. She told me to keep the pictures; she was going to see if the church would approve the job before we started on it.

To be honest, we were so busy at that time I didn’t mind waiting as long as it would take. A couple weeks went by and, sure enough, she called and told us to do the job. Now I had to actually find time to do the work. That's how it goes sometimes.

Before I started drawing, Doug Teets and I went out to the church to see exactly where the piece was going. We needed to get our own measurements and make sure our Jesus wall art was going to fit nicely. There was a space between two windows that was a little more than 10 ft. wide, and that is where she wanted it placed.

I began drawing the wall art basically using the spline tool in Inventor. While placing the image in the background, I would zoom in so close that I couldn’t even tell what I was looking at. Everything looked like an 8-bit video game. After I finished the basic outline and cutouts, I needed to figure out where to cut the artwork in half. Our laser can accommodate a 5 ft. by 10 ft. sheet, and Jesus was going to need a little more meat than that.

I found a happy medium. We could fit the design on a 4-ft. by 10-ft. sheet and a 4-ft. by 8-ft. sheet. The artwork was shaped like a pyramid, so the smaller sheet would work for the top portion. Having a laser cut a straight line down the middle would help get this level in the field since there were no other straight lines to go from. We also needed mounting holes to hold this on the brick wall, so I chose the locations accordingly to try and not interfere with the look and integrity of the art. On the backside of the holes, we welded some 2-in.-long tubing for standoffs to give the artwork a little more depth.

We also added some tabs on the back side of the lower half at the cut line to allow the top half to rest on them. This helped keep it nice and flat.

After it was completed, we powder coated the whole thing black. The guys in the shop were not really sure where Jesus was in the artwork, but they took my word for it.

We don’t do a whole lot of field work at our shop, so installing this would have to work out perfectly with our schedule and eastern North Carolina’s summertime humidity. After moving the finished piece around the shop for a few weeks, we got an email from our customer. She said that the anniversary of her husband's death was coming up soon, and she would like to have it installed before then. I assured her that this would not be a problem and that we already had the artwork completed. We were so busy, but we had to make this happen.

The next week, I kept telling dad that we needed to go install Jesus. He agreed, and we set up a day to do so. Taking up most of two sheets of metal, the piece was cumbersome. We took four guys to the church to get the job done quickly and correctly. You don’t want to go drilling holes in brick, especially at a church, unless you know they are in the right place.

We started with the lower half. Three of us held it up while another leveled and drilled a hole to begin. Once we had one anchor in place, we could adjust the level a little easier. We were midway through the third hole and discovered we could not drill through the brick. These bricks were old and extremely hard. Our bit could not do anything more, so I went to the hardware store with my coworker Jason Barnes to get another. We bought a couple, just in case.

Drilling commenced when we got back, and the new bits were barely enough to finish the job. We were lucky to get 4 holes drilled with each bit. Dad would not have been happy if I had needed to go back to the hardware store while holding up three other guys on a job.

After Jesus was up on the wall, all of us definitely thought the piece looked really good. I heard some say they really couldn’t see the image until it was mounted on the bricks. Everything connected, and the image of Jesus really stood out.

We began cleaning up while Marty Perry touched up the heads on the Tapcon bolts with black paint. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a few people walking toward us—a man, a woman, and a young girl. The woman had a puzzled look on her face and asked if we had approval to do this. I was a little caught off guard, and I said, “Yes.” We had approval, and we were just about finished. She pointed to the man next to her and said he was the head of the church board, and he knew nothing about this.

All of us were kind of taken aback, and he asked me who told us to do this. I told him our customer’s first name, and he immediately said her last name. I said, “That’s her.” Meanwhile Jason turned around and said, “Well, it’s up there now.” At least the guy got a laugh and said “Yeah,” because the damage had already been done.

When we got back to the shop, I called our customer and told her we were finished with the install. She told me she was sitting at the church staring at the new wall art. The woman we had encountered at the church had called her and told her that they knew nothing about the project. Our customer didn’t say much else right then, but she did say that the piece was very inspiring, and she really liked it. She even went on to ask me if I had seen and liked it. I said, “I helped install it, and I think it looks great!”

She said she would be by the shop soon to settle up and talk about the project. When she arrived, there was a nice smile on her face. She told us about the confusion at the church and that everything would work out. I understood, but I should have been a little clearer about when we were doing the install. Maybe she should have met us out there. Live and learn, but jobs like this don’t come around often.

The customer was making small talk with me, since we didn’t know each other that well. She looked on the shop wall and saw one of my framed posts that had been published in The FABRICATOR® magazine. She said, “That’s you." I said, “Yes, it is.”

There wasn’t much more I should’ve said, because I knew she was no longer in the mood for conversation. The whole project was in memory of her husband, and it was starting to sink in. There were a few minutes of silence before she signed her payment. I looked at her and smiled, and she said, “I would like to give you a hug.” I gave her a good one and knew that we had done something that meant a lot to her and her family. Not many jobs come with a hug. I enjoyed it, and it made my day. She left in tears. My first “Jesus job” was done.