Today I was going through some archived DVD's from years past and I came across many things now just a faded memory. As I browsed images and drawings from back then I realized how many projects never made it past the concept stage. In the late 90's we were busy working on the massive West Edmonton Mall project, putting a new face on many of the attractions. One attraction we did a bunch of design for was the Deep Sea attraction. The mall management wanted to replace the submarines with some other attraction and some submerged glass tunnels were the idea of the day. Our job was to come up with the theme. As I recall the idea was to put an elevator at the end of the existing submarine dock which would take people down to the glass tunnel walkway through the five acre lagoon. The theme was to be a steampunk look with oversized mechanical components. The theme was to extend to the bridge over the lagoon as well. Some of the ideas were salvaged for the Sea life Caverns and the ticket booth for the submarine ride but most stayed on the drawing board for another day
Last weld
It was with great delight we did the last weld on the second Viking ship's hull today. It's been a long nine weeks of welding. They are quite the structures! We'll begin taking the hull apart for shipping to the galvanizers first thing on Monday. We still have a little welding to do on some of the bits and bobs plus we have to make a few stands and pallets for shipping the pieces but the bulk of the welding is now behind us on this project at last. The entire driveway is now lined wall to wall with the sections of ship but as they return from the galvanizers we'll be bolting them together and beginning the sculpting process.
Together again!
We are getting pretty fast at disassembling and reassembling the frames for the Viking ships. We first built the lower half of the ship inside the shop. When we were done this was then taken apart, moved out of the shop and reassembled outside. We then built the top half of the ships before disassembling it all once again to send to the galvanizers. All this was done two times as there are two ships. Now we are finally getting the first of the ship pieces back from the galvanizers and we are reassembling them one last time as half (length wise) ships. We'll tie on the galvanized lath and then sculpt the ship planks to complete the hulls. We'll then carefully crane the upper and lower sections into shipping containers for their long journey to Dubai. One more day of welding will finish off the last pieces of the hulls and we are all extremely glad to be finished this part of the project. It's been nine weeks of cutting, fitting, welding and grinding steel!
