Welding Tips and Tricks

This is something my friend, Cupcake (Laura), and I have been working on for the past couple weeks. It's a dragon luminaire for an April Fools Day parade that they have in Ann Arbor MI every year. I never heard of this parade before she went to one a year ago and thought it would be fun if we made something for this years. She wanted to make a dragon , so we found a couple of images by Googling dragon clip art. When we settled on what she liked (first picture), we copied it, put it onto an overhead projecter, got it to the size we thought best and traced the outline of it onto a piece of 4x4 luaun with a sharpie marker. We then bent 1/8th steel rod around the shape of the profile. We didn't bend any of the spikes or teeth, just the basic body shape, head and jaws. This gave us a vertical middle to shape the piece to. To make the 3d body, we rolled more pieces of 1/8th inch rod on a planetary ring roller and flattened the rings into ovals and I welded them to the vertical middle piece. we did the same thing with each ring and worked our way up into the head and mouth, where we switched shapes to rectangles. Once we were done with that, we added the spikes and teeth.
The first picture was the outline we traced...
The second is the wire structure pretty much finished. I think we added a little bit more detail, like ears and teeth.
The third is another view of the wire structure....

When we were happy with the shape of the wire structure, the next step was to wrap it in clear packing tape. This gave it a sort of skin and it also helped to stiffen the whole thing up. The final step in the process, what gives it it's color is colored tissue paper is glued to the outside and the clear packing tape helps to support that over the frame. The whole thing is lit from the inside with some l.e.d. puck lights.

The first picture is with it wrapped in clear tape...
The second picture shows my Cupcake applying the colored tissue paper...
And the third picture shows it with 3 l.e.d. puck light inside of it...

We still have a little bit to do on it before it's finished, but it's about 95% done, and it came out looking pretty good!

That's creative!

That really looks like it was a lot of fun to do, and the end result is impressive! Having seen your other work though, there's little doubt she asked the right man for help with this idea.

Steve S

Pretty cool is the rod cage welded together? Or just wired?

That is really cool! I wish I was that artistic! I can see a full scale dragon in the future.
-Jonathan

Very nice.

Thanks!!! It was a lot of fun to make. As the years go by, we will add more features and effects such as smoke coming out of the nose, maybe sparks......we wanted to do some effects this year, but we ran out of time.

Greg, the whole cage is welded together. In the video that I got from the festival that explains how to make these things, they use a much thinner wire to make the shape and everything is wired together. In that case, the clear tape helps to hold everything together, besides just being a place for the tissue paper to get glued to, like in ours1