The Granny Rocket Ship
In 2003, Peter Von designed a Rocket in full Victorian garb. This time the Pancake Tossing Race competitors were in rocket ships – each one different! The background on which they race was made out of a milky acrylic sheet, enabling John “Tilly” Tillbrook to produce an amazing night sky show of lasers blazing away behind the rocket ship girls, on regular cue.
Impressed, Peter Von proceeded to build a giant mother ship, but this time contain Granny in her own blister dome of clear acrylic, activated on time with the mural. Around a steel frame, he carefully rolled sheets of obsolete wood-grained thin MDF, strengthened with bands of blue ‘steel’ and studded with bracing bolts. In true rocket ship fashion, he fitted fins of the same wood grained MDF very carefully crafted in his usual fashion.
Next came the truly interesting parts. Using plastic pipe with standard angled fittings from the plumbing shop, he fitted polished stainless steel heat-sinking flared ends (actually nothing more than salad bowls). The gold finished ‘thrusters’ clustered at the rear are actually plastic hanging baskets and around the giant main thruster is a fibreglass ‘pot of gold’ from the television series Pot of Gold bought damaged at auction ... basically a giant cauldron.
Peter Von:
When buying the plastic sewer pipe and fittings from the plumbing shop, I rejected the first lot offered because it was a little on the rough side, having been on the racks for some time – to the amazement of the sales assistant who couldn’t help remarking somewhat passionately, “Shit man, it’s only sewer pipe. Who gives a stuff what it looks like in the bloody ground?” At times like this it’s always best to shut up, pay for it and leave. But I never learn and soon the whole bloody plumbing shop, trade customers and all, were involved with comments like, “You’re gonna what?”
Because of the size, I had been keeping the big damaged fibreglass Pot of Gold cauldron for a special occasion on the roof of my workshop out of the way. One day, it blew down next door to the delight of the neighbour’s dog. Soon I was called to the fence by the puzzled neighbour, who enquired if it was mine. “No, I said, never seen it before.” I then said, “It must be part of some satellite”, pointing to the damaged part and the blackening from its use on television as a cauldron. “Oh God”, the neighbour replied excitedly, “I’ll ring up Channel 9!” It took me 10 minutes to convince her that I was trying a lame kind of joke before she’d give it back. I made a mental note: restrict my jokes to the initiated.
The nose cone for the rocket was one of my personal success stories, considering how tricky it was to build (not to mention time-consuming) and one of the only times I used computer-based technology – fat lot of good it was!
Starting with having to jig-saw 30 MDF ‘ribs’ and glue them together to form a cone, the thought of covering them with a ‘skin’ of aluminium tapering strips fitting precisely filled me with dread. So, against my wishes, I reluctantly had them laser cut to what I hoped were exact measurements. Of course I was dreaming, as somehow they gradually got out of line and the job of gluing the ribs to the cone of MDF took hours of snipping, fiddling, swearing and grappling with glue. The only good part was the tricky lustrous surface I managed to get on the aluminium using a worn-out sanding disc on my finisher.
If you must know, I hid the bad joins under plastic-chrome strips usually used on cars. The neat little polished balls trimming the rim of the nose cone are aluminium fence knobs, usually left in the rough and consequently cheap.
All of the plastic pipes, the cauldron pot and the handing basket thrusters were given a magic ‘candy apple’ gold paint job by Adelaide-based Sign Language. Tilly animated Granny to wave her jam spoon in her clear acrylic dome – which also lights up when the accompanying Tossing Race – becomes animated, thrilling the kids (and adults, too). Tilly painstakingly created a special rolling-and-rocking motion for the whole rocket ship at regular intervals to coincide with a very convincing ‘firing up’ laser show from the thrusters and the cauldron, coupled with the sound from the main restaurant speakers of a genuine lift-off.