Man Welds "Life Size" GOT Steel Dragon - COOLEST THING I'VE EVER MADE EP23

[Music] When people that have never seen my work  see it in person, the look they get in   their eyes when they see it, it's like  watching children show up at Disneyland.   Each single piece is individually cut by hand,   shaped by hand and welded on by hand. So this is  probably the greatest sculpture I've ever done. Welcome to my shop. We're here  in Abbotsford B.C. We're about   an hour out of Vancouver BC. I rent a big  shop here on a farm to build my artwork.   [Music] I had a hot rod shop before  this. My artwork started to take off   and it became full-time work for me  and it wasn't something I could do on   the side with a hot rod shop anymore.  So I sold out to my partners and we   relocated out to here. Now we're  here building artwork full-time. One of the biggest opportunities back in 2011 I  received a phone call from Dollywood in Tennessee   and they were building the world's first winged  roller coaster in North America it's called the   Wild Eagle. So they commissioned me as you  build this giant eagle. As my work started   to become more popular the opportunity arose to  not be building cars and focus on my dream of   building large-scale artwork. [Music] So  this is a 55 foot stainless steel T-Rex.   Everything is hand formed, handmade. These  sheets don't come this way, this is all,   every one of these hammer marks is is done with a  power hammer.    So it's an old 110 year old machine  that we purchased from another hot rod friend of mine and he saw me hammering using a hammer   and a sandbag. He's like "holy crap man like  I've got a machine that'll do that for you." And I mean what a lifesaver it was this  is just so much hammering and texturing   to do it takes hours and hours and hours and  hours and hours per panel I'm thinking that  it's probably got about three to four thousand square feet of stainless steel just to skin it.  I kind of create sculptures one problem at a time. The skeleton of the sculpture is my first problem   Putting it together and engineering it, so that's  the first problem. So what I've done for this   one is I've used um stainless steel angle and  stainless steel flat bar to shape the sculpture.  I had these rings, you can see the rings in here  to give my overall shape for the tail and for the body. I kind of look at each piece of the sculpture  as a problem that I have to solve. Learning it over   the years in my whole career 30 plus years of  shaping metal you kind of get to know it. It's like a friend after a while you you know that it's  going to bend this way or shape that way. Designing  is consuming that's the only way I can describe it because I live eat and sleep my sculptures. Everybody asks like do you have to cut  walls down to get your sculptures out?  But everything I do has to fit through  the doorway and it's a 12 by 12 doorway. And if it fits through the doorway it'll  fit on a truck and go down most highways   and fit under most bridges so we're  pretty good there on a low bed trailer. So this is probably the greatest  sculpture I've ever done. This is a almost a full-scale replica  of a Game of Thrones dragon. I based it on Drogon which is the original dragon  from Game of Thrones. It's designed to shoot fire. I would say the dragon has been my most complicated most detailed and most time consuming sculpture to date. He's about 12 feet tall. He's about 44 feet wide with his wings folded. Spread out they'd probably be about 100 foot wingspan.  With his tail mounted his tail goes 30 feet in air. Assembled he's probably fifteen thousand  pounds. [Music] So I started with the inside of the mouth and then worked my way around using round bar. So all the teeth were shaped bent and ground to points. Round bar for his gums, sheet metal for the  inside of his mouth. Up inside is the fire system at the corners of his mouth. So I have two electric igniters and the gas tube coming out of his mouth. All the texture was done by welding and by  round bar so to make the big spikes I bent   and curved and welded together half inch round  bar and then to give it all that texture and   the thickness, I just welded and welded and welded  layers and layers and layers. I left the splatter   and the roughness and texture to it because I thought that gave it a real you know kind  of a horn kind of feel to it. And then these are all made by hand so each scale is laid out on a full sheet of metal. We draw them all with ink on  the table. One of the things I'm proud of is that   each single piece is individually laid out by  hand cut, by hand, shaped by hand and welded on by hand.  So it's a completely handmade piece. I like  to use different textures and colors to represent   all the different layers of the skin and stuff.  So this is all done with lots of passing back   and forth like this with the torch on there and  as soon as I start seeing color, then I move the   torch and keep that color flowing. It gives it  more a feel of texture and what I was trying to   create is kind of that feel of skin or leather  without trying to put all the wrinkles into it.   These scales represent that chest armor but  once you get to his belly or after his belly   the scales go from armor scales to full length  belly scales which they've been laying out here.   So you can see these patterns of paper these  will be transferred into steel and then heat   treated and these these wrap around the belly and  they get layered and there's probably 50 or 60 of   them to cover the whole belly all the way to the  tip of the tail. And you can see up here there's a   structural frame that supports the wings and that  structural frame is built into his wing and comes   down to the ground here and eventually where his  front claw is there will be holes in here where   anchors can be put into the concrete. His feet are  designed to be removable. I can anchor him to the   concrete slip his feet back on to cover the anchor  points and you don't see how he's bolted down. Not many people get to see inside my sculptures but as you can see it's a heavy and quite a massive structural   frame inside here. 10 inch steel pipe to support  the wings and the legs of the frame. Yeah just a   neat perspective. Here we've got a propane hookup  this will be hooked up to a manifold system which   will provide the flow of the propane to the  mouth of the dragon and create the the flame. My lifetime achievement goal for what I  do is to be known for building the world's largest sculpture. If you do a little  research into some of the pieces that   have been made around the world now, they're  ridiculously huge. They make my stuff look   puny, so I would love to be involved in doing  a piece that would not only be the world's   largest but something that would last like the  pyramids last for generations and generations. My life-size Steel Dragon is  the Coolest Thing I've Ever Made. [Music]

Channel: Coolest Thing

Views: 799,976

Keywords: coolest thing, coolest thing i've ever made, dragon, dragon sculpture, metal art, metal dragon, metal sculpture, steel dragon, welding art

Id: GJi-2cRTWQk

Length: 8min 14sec (494 seconds)

Published: Thu May 04 2023