How we built an Elephant in 30 days!

Initially, because of the timescale, Clive Doherty and myself had been thinking to use the 4-wheel chassis that was created for our Dinosaur, Hilary. But we quickly decided to make the elephant from scratch and made some sketches, worked out the scale and made a plan.
We decided on a 3-wheeler with a wide wheel base, a single rear drive wheel and rider whose weight would be just behind the front two wheels.
There was to be a platform for a dance performer and a series of cables and ropes to operate moving parts. Clive was keen to link the movement of the legs with the drive action of the mounted cyclist.This was the first time either of us had attempted to create something like this and we learnt a great deal along the way.

Many of the components were built from scratch using recycled bicycle parts and without guillotines, pipe benders or even a flat surface.
We achieved the curved shapes by part cutting slices through the tubes, bending the gaps together and re welding -a satisfyingly organic finish!

I filled in the body shape with hours and hours of spiraling wire work design, onto which I sewed a flexible steel mesh to create an elephant skin. The idea was that we wanted to create a partly transparent finish so that the a mechanical parts would be seen.
I made the eyes out of syrup tin lids and the tusks were the cast-off horns from the Triceratops head that I had carved previously and replaced in wood. At some point she became known as Harminder -an Indian name for both boys and girls, as we weren't sure if she could be a girl elephant with tusks...

We were working around the clock to get Harminder completed and lots of friends came in to help. I remember nodding off on the job a couple of times and near to the deadline we did a few 'all-nighters'. It was worth it though.


The weather was turning, there was no under cover space for the frame and there was no space for test runs or time to keep taking parts up and down to the ground floor.
Two days before the Diwali event, around 16th October, we took Harminder the elephant in lift-loads to the ground floor and outside, where we rigged her up to test.
This was all uncharted territory that we were treading and once we had managed to push her to some level ground I mounted her, whilst everyone watched to see what was going on. We really didn't anticipate the weight on the rear wheel and within a few moments it buckled.
This meant we had a great deal of tweaking and fixing to get done and no time to test her again before the event. We worked all night to finish her. Clive re-enforced a new bmx wheel replacing the spokes with steel rods. And we did the best we could and get her ready for her premiere performance!
Miraculously she performed beautifully. But once the deadline was reached, we knew that there were lots of improvements to be made. I think we'll always be messing around with her.