“All right” said the Gnat. “Half way up that bush, you’ll see a Rocking-horse-fly, if you look. It’s made entirely of wood, and gets about by swinging itself from branch to branch.”
“What does it live on?” Alice asked, with great curiosity.
“Sap and sawdust,” said the Gnat.
Another of my (Ben's) contributions tonight, and the Rocking Horse Fly design. Whilst I was mainly doing the Jabberwock sculpture for this show, I knew I'd have evenings away from the cellar where it was being built, and wanted to do something smaller to offset that build. I was quite taken with the idea of the Rocking Horse Fly anyway, so thought about doing something which could be strung up in a tree somewhere.
Looking at the designs, I first went back to a sculpture I made way back in 2003, loosely inspired by a statue in the West Midlands depicting Sliepnir, the legendary 8-legged horse ridden by Odin. I cannot remember why my build ended up as a Pegasus for that project, but the sculpture survived the last decade and a half, mainly as an ornament on my desk.
It looked not too bad after all that time, but a little too 'severe' for this project. Given the harsh, brutal nature of the Jabberwock as a machine-creature I definitely wanted something 'softer', though not right across the spectrum into My Little Pony territory.
The inspiration came from seeing a suitable Christmas Tree ornament, which started me sketching.
Now at this point I planned on making them out of wood, which meant going back to the angular design, cutting them out from ply with hand tools. But then by happy coincidence, in late Autumn at work I needed to get in some practise with both 2D Design and our Laser Cutters, so after work one day I stopped behind and after some difficulties, came up with a multi-layer design for the Rocking Horse Fly.
This is the first test-print, done on a scrap of 3mm MDF, and proved both the concept and the fact the design worked on the cutter.
Now I wanted to veer away from the text a bit and the wooden nature of the creatures, and do something a bit unusual, and something weatherproof which meant acrylic (to avoid a ton of varnishing). As luck would have it, I had a big sheet of clear acrylic in my model-making store of materials, left over from the days of the Britannia Project (acquired cheap from a previous college because it had been cracked). So another after-work session gave me the above piece, which I absolutely loved.
And then the problem.
This piece, and a smaller test one, used up all of my sheet of acrylic, and so I started investigating prices of buying the material, and got a bit of a shock. Even if I'd been cheeky and bought through work with a bulk discount, it would have been prohibitively expensive.
The happy solution was that this coincided with a project at work which needed me to cut about a hundred backing-boards for a vacuum-form project. This meant lots of oddly-shaped dead-spaces on the A1 sheets, which couldn't be recycled easily, but it did mean the component parts of the Rocking Horse Fly could be squeezed into the gaps and holes of the boards. So gradually over the course of a few months, I built up a stock of parts for them, just filling dead spaces on projects at work.
I then fortuitously found two sheets of similar quality 3mm ply in my own stores at home (again, post-Britannia project) and so stayed another few nights after work had finished, and when nobody needed the cutter, and produced a few more of them.
As a nice by-product, parts of the design have been incorporated into official projects at work too, especially the wings.
Of course, being made of MDF they have their problems; despite soaking them with varnish, the material is susceptible to damp. And whilst they've been assembled with outdoor-quality wood glue, I reckon they'll gradually fall to bits in the wind.
They were mainly strung up (with fishing wire) near the main steps down from the mansion into the formal gardens...
A slightly Wonderland version of the kitsch '3 ducks flying up the living-room wall'
We also put a couple actually in the trees near the Jabberwock.
So there we go- what started as a test-project to get some experience with the Laser Cutter at work produced a design I am extremely happy with indeed, and which people keep asking about. It will be nice to retrieve any which survive the show, and put them up somewhere in the garden after the show...
DISCLAIMER
Because there is a good chance someone from work will see this, I'd just like to re-iterate the facts that: All materials used in this project were either scrap material destined for the bin, or purchased by myself (in the case of the acrylic and some of the MDF). The Laser Cutter was used in the evenings outside of my paid hours, and at points where it was not required by other staff or students.
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