Dragon parts coming together (Sanni)
Tuesday, June 14th, 2006
Dragon Ranch, Loimaa, Finland
It's been a long time since my last entry already and that has something to do with our fully loaded timetables. Anyhow, we have proceeded a lot. During last week we covered the dragon with iron plates, noise-protected the engine, covered the cabin with plywood, welded the neck and tail parts, welded the front legs into shape, covered the body with skin and did a lot of other things.
We have ran out of materials several times and always managed to arrange more of them before lack of something would have interrupted our work. One would imagine that building a dragon would mostly be cutting and welding but actually it's also necessary for someone to spend half of the day speaking on the phone about stuff that needs to be brought here or to Cinderhill. The dragon team also needs to be fed. I've been cooking every day since, after all, I may be the fastest one to do that as Heiko and his work is seriously needed elsewhere.
But now to the news. Timo L had been talking with a relative about boats and mentioned our dragon. He found out that a sailing club from Kirkkonummi, Finland, perhaps had some spare masts laying in their boat shelter. I called them and they really had them and were willing to give them to us for free! So thank you KVP Kantvikin Purjehtijat! Carbon fibre masts are perfect building stock for the dragon wings.
A TV and radio group from the Finnish public service broadcasting company YLE in Turku also visited us yesterday. We'll be on local TV news either today or tomorrow evening. The radio show will be aired tomorrow morning.
Today we were otherwise positively surprised. We weren't expecting anybody when the phone rang and on the other end was a guy from a transporting company saying that he was coming, being only a few hundred meters from the house. Inside the truck there was a Ponsse wheel - we knew it was coming but not this fast - and it also had the hoop in it, which saved a lot of time and work from us! Thank you Ponsse. In the same truck there also was a new hydraulic table. With these the core of the harvester will soon be cabable to work as a dragon. Timo also sent us a thing that looks like a big fan. It will provide the pneumatic systems with air.
And yeah, Epa and Henkka test drived a Festo muscle today. I'm really impressed - it looks like a big eel. When it's empty, it's long and slim. Then it fills up with air and gets shorter. It can move very fast, which looks somehow spooky. This one is more than a meter long. I tried hanging on the end of it and it could lift me up without any problems.
What else I was going to say? Oh, the Dragonbane truck is coming here today to pick tons of things that are going to Cinderhill. The people in the truck are staying here over night. I hope they can sleep while we work. We decided to sleep more during daytime and work at nights because the heat wave is killing us. We absolutely have to wear blue overalls all the time to avoid burning ourselves with cutting or welding sparks. Vesa even built a swimming pool for us so we can drop into it once in a while.
We could use more people. Now everyone here can weld so if we had more people we could proceed really fast. However, even though everybody is tired and working hard, we are still doing pretty well right now. The dragon camp signs off.
Sanni Turunen
