Horse

I don’t even know where to begin to rationalize this project, or explain how I even came up with this. For a country kid, I own very few horses (none) and I guess I was feeling a bit left out. This project has been put on hold until I can figure out exactly where I want to go with this project.

I guess the idea began to form while I was at the county fair. Again, I don’t want to pretend I know where some of my ideas come from, I just go along with it.

My first step was to find a model of a horse to reference. I have some blender experience from years ago but there was no way I could start from scratch. I simplified the mesh using blender and then started tracing it in fusion. I wanted to have ribs spaced 15cm apart and then three horizontal ‘spines’ (if you will) running down the length of the horse at 90, 45, 45 degreed to hold the ribs in place and prevent rotating. Then I put notches in each piece to slot together like [something that slots together] I did this in two parts with the idea of having the horse still be able to open like a clamshell in case I wanted to put something in it in the future. I manually exported all the sketches as svgs and put them all into illustrator where I rearranged them to fit on 4×8 sheets for when I cut them out. I printed the patterns and used a jigsaw to cut out all 25 pieces by hand.

This is about where the project ends right now. I’ve looked into a couple ways to move forward, and once I let the horse back out of the stable, if you know what I mean. I think my best option is to construct the legs out of 1” black steel pipe. I’ll reinforce it horizontally using standard pipe elbows and stuff, then I looked into some expanding poly foam that I could use to fill the inside with. Then all I have to do is find some convincing faux? horse skin and we’re good to go! For now, this is all speculation, and hopefully I’ll be able to fill it out a bit more soon.