A couple weeks ago I was goofing around in the basement and knocked our "camping shower tent" in a zip-bag off a shelf.

The bag wasn't zipped...
And almost instantly the shower tent popped out of the bag, unfolded itself, and sprung into its full size.
All 7-ish feet tall of it in a basement that's only 6 feet tall.

It was dramatic enough that the whole incident stuck in my mind vividly, and I've been thinking about how cool spring steel is.
Since then I've played around a couple times with twisting the shower tent into all kinds of weird shapes and seeing how "alive" spring steel acts.

So I got a crazy idea that it would be fun to do sculpture with spring steel.
Especially sculpture that captures that "alive" and "responsive" property of spring steel, especially when it's under tension, then pushed on by some force, like an observer's hand, or maybe wind.
I'd be looking to create structures under some kind of "tension", I think, that could be manhandled by teenagers without proper supervision, and still spring back into shape.

I have a welder I inherited from my dad last year that I've only used for one tack so far, but it works.

I've tried to Google looking for books on how to bend, twist, plate* spring steel... and so far I haven't found anything.
I don't know if I'm not using the right search words?

But I'm looking for some learning material on working with spring steel.
And I'm also looking for a source of a reasonable (starting SMALL) amount of material. (so I don't get carried away and destroy the shower tent and get on my wife's naughty list)

Ideas?

Thanks!

D


*so a sculpture won't rust outside


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