Ariel was the one thing that did not work fully for the parade. The idea was her voice would float away... it did not. But everything else worked.



To make Ariel we used a method covered in much more detail other places in the internet for making homemade sewing forms. Basically you find a sucker, I mean volunteer, and put an old long sleeved shirt not them (in our case it was an old scrub jacket someone had... but this sure made the cuffs hard to cut off). You then cover them with 3 foot strips of duct tape. The places that talked about this used 5-6 layers of duct tape. For what we were doing 3-4 were enough. After you get them all duct taped up you just cut it off of them, duct tape up the seam, and stuff it with polyester stuffing (like what is in a stuffed doll). Vola! You have a perfect shape of your model. It really worked better than I thought it would. Do be careful what you have under the shirt you are cutting. You don't want to have something nice or loose... you will end up cutting the clothing. Going bare works well, but you have to be careful cutting it completely off (or at least if you are cutting it off your female in the living room with much of the rest of the office and their family). Do the same for the bottom half, only wrap the legs together as one body... this is a mermaid.



Get a 3' piece of 3/4" PVC with a 45 at one end. Fit this 45 into the opening in her neck. Get a 2x2 and firmly attach it to the PVC pipe. Most of the pull from this system will be on the PVC, so its attachment to the 2x2 is the important part, not the duct tape body. Just as long the the body is attached, and will not slide down, it is fine.



And now for something completely different.... When I went to attach the PVC to the body I went over to one of the girls house in my office (Teresa) where we were doing much of this. I had the code to the garage door. After getting started I realized I forgot my knife in my truck. So I opened the garage door, walked out and got the hunting knife I keep in the door of my truck, and walked back into the garage. As I was walking in I took the knife out of its sheath, stabbed it into the neck of the figure laying on the ground at the front of the garage, proceeded to pull a bunch of stuffing out from the abdomen area, and then when to shut the garage door because it was kinda cold. Shortly there after the girls who's house I was at got home, and her neighbor called and wanted to know what was going on. He fairly well insisted that he come over to see what all we were doing. I am pretty sure he wanted to come over to make sure the guy with the knife wasn't having a Teresa BBQ!



Now back to Ariel. We Made a box out of 2x4's (4'x4'x3' tall) and attached her to it with the 2x2. We then covered her with paper mache, Kilz, and painted her. The tail we made out of cardboard, and covered the tail with some fancy ribbon... it made it much easer and looked great.



I had a long aluminum pole (I think it was a portable flag pole or something). I attached to the the other end from Ariel with a pulley at the end. Two more pulleys at the bottom of the pole and ariel made up my circuit for the rope.



I got a "screw close chain links" to tie the ends of the rope to. I first tried to just wrap it round the motor spindle, but the groves in the motor made it climb the spindle, and bunch at the top. I then tried cutting the rope at the motor and did the picture you see. The top half went one way, the bottom went the other. As the top spun up, the bottom let out. It backlashed and just didn't work.



SPECULATION: I THINK that if I would have covered the entire spindle with tape, covering up the spiral groves, it would have worked fine in the original configuration. I also think that if I would have covered up that bottom grove in the spindle it would have not backlashed. I think it was the gap at the bottom of the spindle groves that it got hung up in, but I am not sure.



For the light I used a cheap plasma ball from American Science & Surplus. It normally used 12v DC from a wall wart, but as I already had 12v DC I just hooked it up to the 12v DC lines I had. (as a side note I used normal [polarized] home wall plugs for my 12v DC lines.... I know this was a risk, so I was VERY careful labeling and marking everything!!! It made it much easer to find connectors. I never had any problems with this set-up during the parade. As another side note if you do forget about this and plug the plasma ball into a wall outlet a few days after the parade it will not only give you a light show like none other, and fill your kitchen with smoke... it will also cause you wife to be very unhappy with you!!! Not that I would have ever made such a bone headed move!!!).

I simply cut the positive (hot) wire and passed the two ends into a relay. Plug it in, really on, and globe comes on. Really off, the light goes off.



I also did the same thing with the spot light. I Wanted to be able to turn the spot light off when the light was coming back down. So I again cut the hot wire on a regular extension cord, and passed it through a relay.



So we had a Wave Shield playing Ariel's song, the spot light going on and off, the plasma ball turning on and off, and the motor [not] moving the plasma ball up and down (boo).

