We've been working with our engineer for weeks to design a solid frame on which we will build the Viking features. These drawings were reviewed by two other engineering teams before the approvals came back for us to start. Then we began the work on the super strong framework. All of that will stay hidden in the end. Today at last, we started in on the armature for the feature itself. The prefabricated stern headpiece and bow dragon tail of the shipwreck were the first pieces to be set in place. Everything else will be built around these two pieces.
Toothy grin - times two hundred
I'm not big on skull imagery but when one is building a pirate themed project they definitely need to be there. Scallywag Bay in Trinidad will be surrounded by a steel fence and plain old bars wouldn't do. We decided the skull and crossed wrenches logo should be featured in the centre of each fence panel. To look proper the logos would be cut and welded into the bars which meant we needed to cut two hundred and twenty half inch thick logos from plate steel. The heavy plate steel arrived today - all nineteen thousand pounds of it! We used the forklift to put the first sheet of steel onto the MultiCam CNC plasma cutter and set it in motion. It's going to take a few days to accomplish the task but we did almost thirty pieces today.
Flying high!
About a dozen years ago, just after we finished our new shop, I was asked to design and help build our first truly international theme project. It was an adventure golf on the third floor of Mall of America in Minnesota. It was no small task. They flew me down there and within two weeks I had finished the approved design and selected a local contractor to help me with the onsite portion of the project. We built all of the signs and features in our shop and they filled two large semi trailers for the trip down to the site. I flew down to supervise the installation - about five or six trips in all. One of the large features was a twin engine plane with a twenty-four foot wingspan. As the plane had to hang from existing girders, the engineers instructed me that the it was not allowed to weigh more than two thousand pounds. We came in fifty pounds underweight! It was an engineering challenge as the wings and tail had to come off for transport and everything had to pass a strict fire code. The job was completed in about two months from start to finish.
