Will it fit?

Today is a milestone day.  The plan is for a large, but transportable, instrument.  It also need to fit into the available space at our house fully assembled.  Previous invented instruments have not been so successful in this regard.  Although amazing, Mr Pipe-o-matic, for example, is just a little too difficult to transport.

Oh, that is a bit longer than I expected.

My goal was for a transportable instrument, that is quite large, can be played by multiple people, is cool as a sculptural object and that I can easily take apart and put together on my own, even with a damaged elbow.  Experience suggests that all of these goals will not be achieved.  I haven't even started on the musical modes for the instrument, but today is the crunch point for much of the rest.

With a certain amount of excitement and trepidation I set off for my brothers house to collect the legs, jigsaw and offcuts of plywood.

We waste a few minutes trying to work out how to remove the back seat and make more space in the car. The seat gives every impression of being removable, which would let the seat backs lie flat, but we cannot work out how.  So, we try to putting the legs in the car anyway.

Yesterday, when they were still loosely held together components, this was quite tricky.  Today, with the legs glued irrevocably into place it turns out to be fairly easy.  Both sets of legs will sit horizontally in the back seat of the car.

How to fit an Elephant in a car

I will refer to this blog whenever I have trouble fitting the Elephant in the car.

I get home and can't resist trying to assemble the Elephant on my own.  After a bit of struggling my conclusion at this stage is that this is an impossible task.  It takes two people, or one person and some additional items that haven't been created yet, to assemble the legs and backbone.

Hey, there's an Elephant in the garden.

Next step, removing the excess gorilla grip glue.  This glue is much harder to remove than the standard gorilla glue and this takes a while.

Then I have to re-check the rib placement and cut the slots in the ribs.

One of the ribs will not fit in between the shoulder blades.  So, the first step is a minor adjustment to the rib shape.  After that I start cutting the slots with a jigsaw.  A couple of the ribs don't work as planned.  The rib that has been adjusted also needs a deeper slot to allow the ribs to make a nice curve.  It takes a couple of tries to get this right.  One of the lower ribs clearly needed a much shallower slot.  I check the original model, and yes, the slot on that one rib is shallower.  I'll need to either add a spacer, or recut the rib correctly.  The spacer is easier at this stage, although I may cut the new rib at a later time.

We finally have a fully slotted Elephant frame.

An Elephant in the conservatory

It looks much bigger than 1:10 scale...

Tomorrow I have a choice of going to the doctor and getting my elbow checked, sanding or trying to solve the head problem.