Moby Sue the Bison-Whale?

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It’s been cold in North Carolina lately. Not Minnesota or Wisconsin cold, but cold enough to make working in an unheated garage very disagreeable. (We’re talking about temperatures in the mid-30s.) So I looked at the start of this week with great joy. Temperatures were moving back to the mid-50s and this meant I could continue with the bison build in earnest.

My goal for this week was rather straight forward. Cut sheet metal to create a silhouette of a bison body, and then attach that silhouette to a bison frame/skeleton. If you remember last week’s bison-build post, that’s the way my digital-mentor John Lopez creates his scrap-metal masterpieces. Here’s the video I included in that post.

To create the silhouette bison body, I placed five 2-foot-by-4-foot pieces of 16-gauge sheet metal on the floor of my garage to form a 4-foot by 10-foot canvas. I then traced a 9-foot long head and body of a bison on this canvas. Next, I picked up each of the 2-foot-by-4-foot pieces and cut away the sheet metal that wasn’t part of the silhouette bison body.

Cutting the superfluous sheet metal from the essential sheet metal wasn’t an easy task. Neither an electric shear nor an angle grinder is a scalpel. You can’t make fine or intricate cuts. But I did muddle through and my silhouette bison body bore a satisfactory resemblance to my bison template. Here’s a picture of both the silhouette and the template.

With the silhouette bison body complete, I excitedly returned to the house to fetch Mrs. Groovy. “You gotta see the bison,” I proclaimed.

Needless to say, I was expecting an “Oh, wow!” when Mrs. Groovy walked into the garage. And needless to say, I was somewhat crestfallen when Mrs. Groovy gazed upon my creation with a bemused look and asked…

“Are people going to know it’s a bison?”

“You think they’ll confuse it with a cow?” I replied.

“No,” Mrs. Groovy said sheepishly. “It doesn’t look like a bison or a cow. It kinda looks like a whale.”

All I could do was laugh. I never really explained to Mrs. Groovy how I was going to attack the bison build. She had no idea who John Lopez was, and she never watched the above video of the welded horse sculpture. So in her mind, she couldn’t envision my bison silhouette with legs. All she could envision was some legless oval blob sitting on our front lawn!

Final Thoughts

Once I explained to Mrs. Groovy what she was actually looking at—and once she watched the welded horse sculpture video—she felt a lot less concerned. She still couldn’t entirely see where I was going with the bison build, but she was happy to know that I wasn’t going to mar Groovy Ranch with a ridiculous bison that looked like a whale. [Mrs. Groovy here: I still think you’re brilliant even though half the time I don’t know what you’re talking about. I smile and nod a lot.]

Okay, groovy freedomist, that’s all I got. What say you? Does my bison silhouette look like a bison or a whale? Let me know what you think when you get a chance. Peace.