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There were a few nervous moments last week for sculptor Thomas Sayre while construction crews raised a giant, wheel-shaped art piece out of its clay mold and installed it at the site of the future Southeast Tacoma Street/Johnson Creek light-rail station.

The Raleigh, N.C.-based artist, who typically installs his public art pieces with the help of his own crews, stood by as crews from Alameda, Calif.-based Stacy and Witbeck performed the installation.

“At 60,000 pounds, this was a little more complicated than their previous installations,” Sayre said.

The heavy lifting – for the first of two large, connected pieces – went off without a hitch. The wheel-shaped pieces, with working names of “Gear” and “Blade,” will serve as landmarks for the station and reference both Johnson Creek’s lumber history and the transit aspect of light rail.

Sayre employed an earth-casting technique, which symbolizes his belief that humans need to start doing things more in balance with nature, he said.

“All kinds of wheels have converged on that site,” Sayre said. “Now we have new wheels – the green wheels of light rail.”

As part of the drilling process for the first piece, Sayre’s crew used an auger. The drill bit produced 36 intersecting holes in the ground with two different depths. A backhoe will be used to dig for the second piece, so that sculpture will have a more angular appearance when it is erected, he said.

After drilling the hole, Sayre and his crews, with assistance from Stacy and Witbeck, then suspended rebar, which had been fabricated and shipped from Raleigh, inside the mold.

“It was very delicate work because if you nick the side of the hole, that affects the casting and could potentially ruin the mold,” said Michelle Traver, public art coordinator for the TriMet Public Art Program. “But they lowered the cages in place without any incident.”

Counting on the dirt to stay intact, Sayre and his crew then tied in the rebar for the footing and worked with a mason’s crew to pour the concrete, she said.

“They rocked,” Traver said. “It cured.”

The next step was excavation of the first piece, which took place last week.

Stacy and Witbeck’s crews dug around the sculpture and used a 395-ton crane to lift the piece out of its mold. It was then placed on the footing and tied in with reinforcement.

For Sayre, the whole process with Stacy and Witbeck turned out to be very collaborative, he said.

“They found the dirt. They were helpful to us when we were installing the steel,” Sayre said. “They have expertise we don’t have and vice versa. They also had the equipment that we don’t have. We learned many things from them.”

The $250,000 art installation is one of the first for the Portland-Milwaukie light-rail line. Twenty artists were selected to produce art costing $3 million – or 1.5 percent of the project’s civil construction budget, Traver said. Stacy and Witbeck is contractually obligated to install the art pieces along the way, she said.

For Stacy and Witbeck, the process was unique in the number of people it involved and the shared work with the artist and various crew on site, field engineer Rob Cunnane said.

“It was a cool collaboration,” he said. “It wasn’t one specific crew. It was a handful with various areas of expertise. It was unique and we got a lot of workers involved with it.”

Eventually, there will be landscaping around both pieces, which will book-end the station, she said. The second art piece is expected to go up by next summer, Cunnane said.