The Dutch creator of a taxidermied cat helicopter has turned his hand to a more ambitious project, in the shape of OstrichCopter.
OstrichCopter is half ostrich, half quadcopter. The ostrich part is a male specimen who died of a disease at an ostrich farm. The enormous machine was created by visual artist Bart Jansen with the help of technical engineer Arjen Beltman, with financial support from RC Technics.
In 2012, the duo created Orvillecopter, a remote controlled quadcopter made from the remains of the artist’s cat Orville, who was run over by a car.
Jansen said of OstrichCopter: “I thought it was really funny to make fly a bird that can’t [fly]”
He had first got hold of the ostrich for another installation called Road Kill Big Bird. He asked around different farms and eventually found a dead ostrich he could use. He went to pick up the bird (“It smelled and about two litres of crap came out of it in my car”) and then took it to a taxidermist to have it skinned and tanned. He then brought the bird home for his first installation.
When he was invited to show OrvilleCopter at the Zwarte Cross Festival in the Netherlands, he decided to create something new instead.
OstrichCopter is three metres long and weighs 21 kilograms. “It’s quite a challenge to get the thing flying,” Jansen told Wired.co.uk.
The flying mechanism was built from scratch. “We ordered everything and tried to find out what it was going to weigh in total and then pick our engines and our props accordingly,” he said.
He then created a ostrich body scaffold using spray insulation foam. “Getting the shape done was the most difficult part. I looked at hundreds of pictures of live ostriches, dead ones, skinned ones to try and figure out what its body looked like. I had to then fit the skin around it and found that in some places I had too much foam and in others not enough. The skin then got a bit mildewy and I had to take it back to the taxidermist to treat it.”
Getting the huge bird balanced “went remarkably well”. “We learnt a lot from Orvillecopter,” Jansen said. They would balance the bulk of the body on a round piece of wood and then add the neck and legs, making sure it remained balanced. They then placed the cross that holds the engines at that balanced centre point.
In addition to building OstrichCopter, Jansen is working on a jacket made out of roadkill hedgehogs. He currently has 19, but needs more.
Source: Wired