Vision

In a previous post I discussed Cornell’s tradition of Dragon Day and how the physics department partook of the chance to join in the revelry and built unicorn floats. What I left out in that post was the vision behind each unicorn. Indeed, such a noble endeavor could not have been imputed to the world without the conviction granted by Vision.

2014

As the reader may recall, the first unicorn in 2014 looked like this:

The vision behind this majestic form was My Little Pony. The organizer of the first unicorn construction was possessed of the drive to not only make a mythical beast, but to make it (in the parlance contemporary of 2019-2020) extra. However, that first organizer graduated shortly thereafter and the responsibility for the continuation of the Unicorn was handed to me.

2015-2017

The unicorns of the next three years were all shadows of the true form of the vision that had seized me. That Vision was of a robot unicorn inspired by Adult Swim’s Robot Unicorn Attack.

As all attempts at the expression of the form of a thing inevitably are, the first three attempts were but the haziest of outlines. The construction of each, however, brought me inches closer to the form of the truth:

• The 2015 Unicorns were a good test of the switch from chicken wire exoskeleton to wooden endo skeleton on a small scale.

• The 2016 Unicorn revealed the issues with scaling up in weight and size as well as gave us an idea of what would physically be possible to construct.

• The 2017 Unicorn revealed the increased time cost associated with a task of this mamoth undertaking and how to secure the appropriate regulatory approvals from building stakeholders.

Piercing the Veil

Using all of the experience from the previous four unicorns and with the aid of some truly talented friends, in my last year of graduate school (2017-2018) I was able to go hard on the unicorn. The biggest flaw with the earlier unicorns was the difficultly in creating a nice surface finish. For the first unicorn, we somewhat succeeded by gratuitous use of packing film to create a smooth-ish surface to spray paint on top of the chicken wire, but the spray paint didn’t stick too well to the plastic and flaked off. The later unicorns were covered in mylar, but the lack of a fairly dense mesh to stretch the mylar over, the results were less than stellar. Also, it rained on every single Dragon. The packing tape used to secure the mylar was thus also reduced in efficacy. Thus I decided to really do it right, we needed to go with a sheet metal for the “skin.”

Thus resolved, I sculpted a CAD model of a horse to get a sense of the amount of sheet metal I would need to cover the unicorn. I then exported this model to an STL format so I could use a 3d printing slicing program to create a set of crossections of the “ribs” over which to lay the metal. With a surface area in hand, I then tried to find aluminum sheet at a reasonable price to coat the unicorn. It turns out there was a surplus aluminum company just across the Canadian border from upstate New York so I drove to 4 hours to Canada to pick up 30 lbs of aluminum sheet metal. My original plan was to use large approximately square sheets to create a blocky sort of skin, but this Canadian seller happened to have this very reasonably priced, beautiful lot of anodized gold aluminum strips with a shiny finish. This was a fortuitous turn of events.

Next came the ribs:

Putting it all together:

Doing this unicorn right also meant that we had to address another issue we had only tangentially address before: coupling the neck/head to the body. The bay where we constructed the unicorn had an immensely tall ceiling, but substantially smaller doors. Thus to get the unicorn out the door, we had to make the head/neck detachable. The way we did this was with a wooden/aluminum socket that received the pointed end of the unicorn neck. The union was secured by two carriage bolts. We used carriage bolts not because of the load, but because the large size made it easy to manipulate them while simultaneously wrangling a large unicorn neck.

Then we had to figure out how to get the metal on. One of them members of the unicorn team had a brilliant flash of inspiration and went with a herring bone pattern to apply the metal. It was perfect so we ran with it.

The physics department also got in the spirit:

The final product:

It this unicorn the form of the robot unicorn Vision I expressed earlier? No, of course not. To quote Vince Lombardi, “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.” I think that is what I achieved here, excellence. There will always be flourishes I could have added with unlimited time and resources, but I had neither. No, at the conclusion of this project I had no regrets, I felt I had achieved my vision and helped create something that all those who joined in the effort could be truly proud of and that I could pass on the torch and the experience to a new graduate student to do the same.

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