The Building of the Horse #2

Greetings Fellow Humans,

Welcome to the second installment of my series on my ongoing Burning Man Honorarium project "Rearing Horse"! I have made a fair amount of progress on the frame this week, which is exciting since it really helps me visualize how the sculpture will look when done. I spent quite a while pondering how the installation process will work, and came up with a system that should make the install pretty easy compared to previous large projects.

The tail will be one of three major supports that hold the sculpture up. The tube in the tail position in the photo will provide most of the tail's strength, and will be concealed inside of the aesthetic portion of the tail. It will also house the drive cables that power the horse's mechanical effects as well as the wiring for the lights.

This plate is half of the mount for the spine assembly. It has a hinge at the bottom, and bolts together at the top, for easy installation.

The other half of the mount has these crab claw hooks, which allows for easy connection and lifting of the spine assembly. The bolts on top then hold the spine in place.

In this photo I am in the process of trussing the spine for strength. I made the spine this way rather than using a piece of solid tube because the ribs on the c channel will be excellent for hanging the side panels from later. Also, trussing is strong, light, and cool looking. Of course, virtually all of the framework I am building now will be hidden on the final product.

Here I have the spine connected to the legs, although the bolts are not installed.

Here I am building the shoulder joints where the moving front legs will mount.

In this picture you can see the three lower neck hinge points on the top, and the two shoulder hinge points on the bottom tube.

This is the frame as it currently exists. It stands about 9 and a half feet tall. I will be doing a lot of triangulation braces on the legs and tail portion of the frame over the next week, and hopefully get a neck frame and make some good progress on fleshing out the head to the point of being recognizable. As you can see the horse is getting too big to stay in the shop so I need to move it outside soon. I hope the weather will cooperate, as we have been getting some snow storms here.

Thanks for reading!