Thursday, July 1, 2010

Patriotic Disco Owl

Components:
Two conduit connectors, not real sure what they WERE
Two red Jagermeister blinky buttons
A clutch plate from a motorcycle
A blue Ikea Star Lampshade
Two b-line unistrut brackets
A white cat litter bucket lid
Scrap Leather Strap
And a piece of a license plate
There are two bits that slide inside the connector. I used that to sandwich a leather strap across the inside of it to give me a place to hook the Jagermeister blinky tag. After that I screwed them back together to hold the strap in.
 
Now to make the body. First, I used the clutch plate to make a template on my cat liter bucket lid.
Next I took the clutch plate and welded the connectors to it. You can see the results of this:
Then I riveted the cat litter bucket disk to the back of the clutch plate to give it a white body. Next I took the blue Star and cut two of the points off. Be careful when cutting this, as it is brittle plastic!  So I put a hole in the back side of where the wing was so I could get it to be 3D. But I only used one rivet to attach the wing so that I can move the wings up and down. The one rivet is tight enough to hold the entire wing in place. I cut a strip out of the license plate, bent it into a c-clamp and then used the part with the license sticker to make it into a triangle-shaped red beak. Then it got riveted to the plastic body too. Finally, I took the brackets, set them on my welding table in what looked good for a final position. Then I held the body over the brackets and tack welded the body to the feet. It melted the plastic a little bit, but not enough to worry about for structure. Instead, it gave it character!
 
And voila! Disco Blinky Eyed Patriotic Owl. Now if I could only get him to whistle Dixie…. :)