This is the story and process of building a 15ft tall dragon!

The planning phase of this project was pretty easy; the folks I built it for wanted a big dragon, and all the rest of the nitty gritty details were up to me, including how big "big" meant! My goal was to push my limits and build it as large as I could.

I reused the legs from my minotaur sculpture from last winter, they ended up being super undersized for that sculpture, but worked as a great reference for this one. My workspace is about 1/3rd of a 2 car garage, and I filled that with this beast. There was a lot of crawling under and around while working in the garage. I wanted to do as much work on it indoors as I could, since I knew once it went outside I'd be restricted by Wisconsin weather but eventually I got to the point where I couldn't make anymore progress indoors, and needed to move Sid outside!

After getting the beast outside, and being able to look at it from all angles, I knew I had to build up the spine and shoulder framing to look more dragon-y, and from there the project really exploded! It became a lot of "Which part am I going to get after today?", one day working on the neck and head framing, the next filling in a body panel or framing out a leg even further. At some point I established the wing framing, I don't have photos but I think some large ladders and balancing acts were performed to make that happen, and soon enough I got to the point of rolling on scales!

The fun story of running the scales. I had returned from a trip to find my roommates all had covid and caught it as well.

Thankfully, I was only out of commission for a day or so, and then spent the rest of quarantine rolling scales up this beast. It was a meditative process of hanging out in the sun, spraying sheets of metal blue, tracing as many scales on the sheet as I could, and then freehand plasma cutting them all out.

This is when Sid got his name! I had caught up on all my podcasts, so I started streaming Blue Bloods and Law and Order in the @isotunes while welding. A main character of Blue Bloods is named Sid, and that name just felt incredibly natural for the dragon!

One night I pulled off Sid's head, filled in all the body panels, scales, and teeth, and put it all back together! So much progress was made that week!

Wings, claws, and all the finishing touches before getting Sid ready for the big move!

The dismantling and moving of a (likely) 1600-pound dragon!

I frequently joke about being a dirtbag engineer (in the climbing community being known as a "dirtbag" is a point of pride), meaning I have no formal engineering training aside from a bunch of real-world experiences building stuff and moving heavy things.

Dismantling Sid was a feat of my dirtbag engineering abilities; I didn't take nearly as many photos during this part of the project as I'd have liked, mostly because I was convinced that at any moment the pins on the scaffold would shear and the entire thing would come crashing down! I'm incredibly grateful I had @chandlerfrey4 help for this phase, especially when he called me out on my nervousness and kept things moving along!

Amazingly, I never took a photo of the uhaul filled to the brim with parts and pieces, all I know is we drove both a uhaul filled with most of the sculpture, and a pickup with tools, welders, and the front right leg of the dragon in the bed from Wi to Indiana!

The final step in this project, rebuilding and installing Sid at his new home! I (and I assume @chandlerfrey4) was grateful to have the use of a tractor with fork attachments, it made it 10,000x easier to position and lift Sid's body! All in all, it probably took @chandlerfrey4 and me two days to rebuild Sid, opting to weld on parts that had previously been bolted on and do some of the final fabrication that I had planned to deal with on-site to pretty him up.

It's been wild going back down memory lane on this project, going through all the photos, and sharing the story of Sid's journey from trash metal picked off the side of the road (seriously, Sid is mostly file cabinets, washing machines, bedframes, and a trampoline!).