artist
Here she is ready to be loaded on a Nevada-bound container tomorrow. Whereas for Figment Boston we could just wrap the pieces in blankets and pile the rest of the bits in a rental van, for her next journey she needs to be far more robustly packed. Five crates of plywood panels, 3 ALCs of pieces, parts, hardware, and tools, two frames, a training stand, one wheel, and a tube of drive-shafts and pipe segments. Next stop, Black Rock City!
Arrrr! I’m a dragon!
Here is a test of the rear gear, tail wagging mechanism. The push rod will be routed through the back haunches, represented in the video by those two black plastic clips. So this works! …in theory. There are still a lot of details to work out.
MAL gets her painted-lady on…
Thanks to generous help from many friends and community members, MAL is ready for her final decorative painting. All panels have their base coats – teal on the outsides, purple base coat on the tail; the interior faces of the panels have a base of yellow, topped with a shiny, shiny metallic gold. Why put so much energy into painting the interior sides of the panels? Wait until you see her with lights..!
Here’s MAL all disassembled while getting her base coats of paint.
Progress at this stage of a project can sometimes be hard to see. Today’s major milestone was that now the bolts in all four legs line up correctly and fit. Some had to be pulled out and re-drilled to get here. Some hardware had stripped out and needed to be replaced, and we needed to re-engineer some parts of the back haunches to resist warping.
Several pieces got a first of two coats of paint, too, which is important progress but doesn’t photograph well. I think I want to make her ears soon, just to make the photos look better. 🙂
Look at this shiny, shiny gold paint we’re using on MAL!
Ronan Aqua Leaf, FTW.
After a lot of testing and experimentation, we’ve come to the conclusion that we either have to make the tail a lot shorter than we want to, or we need to add a support in the middle. We’re going with adding a support and then swapping springs out for door hinges on the portion of the tail before the support. The end segments of the tail should still be more fluid and floppy, like a cat’s twitching tail, and the part closer to the body will be more stable. Here we’ve added some thickness to the tail pieces to hold the hinges. These will get cut out to work visually with the cut-outs in the tail, but we wanted a successful test on it holding the weight first.
