The most impressive thing about Pirates was the set. I helped with act 1, but of course I have no pictures.

My other contribution was a seagull that unfurled it's wings and flew off stage just after the curtain rose on the first act. For reasons that were amusing at the time the bird was named Dumbo.

Dumbo's wing motion was radio controlled, and he was pulled off stage with a cable attached to his head. Another cable (about 20' long) was mounted to the base of Dumbo's tail and was attached to a pipe above the stage near front center. This second cable acted as the radius of a circle with the origin at the pipe. The head cable just made Dumbo follow the circle from the stage floor and up so that he was about 12' off the stage when he exited stage right.

Dumbo's frame is aluminum except for the center piece that runs the length of the body - that's steel. Inside there are two big honking servos mounted to a piece of wood, one servo per wing. The head is fiberglass in epoxy resin. I figured the head would take a beating since it was sure to bump into something hard or have some other mishap. The central piece was made of steel for a similar reason, namely I wanted something strong in there so it didn't crumple in an accident or bend under the stress of being pulled at high speed off the stage.

The wings were designed to do one thing - open. Each wing was made of three sections that approximated the upper arm, lower arm, and finger extension of an actual wing. One cable was mounted so that as the shoulder extended the cable would extend the elbow. Then another cable opened the wrist joint in response to opening the elbow. The servo for each wing started the process by pulling a lever to extend the shoulder.

The feathers were leftover slats from horizontal blinds. They were slightly curved, which gave them linear strength. I mounted them to the leading edge of the wing with a loose loop of wire and then tied thread along the trailing edge with just enough slack so that they would be evenly spaced when the wings opened.

The wings were powered by4 D-cell batteries that were threaded around the innards, mostly near the tail. There was also a remote kill switch that saved the batteries and removed the load on the servos. This was handy because Dumbo was left hanging in the rafters fir the entire first act, which lasted over an hour.

Here you can see that the wingspan was about 5'6". I read somewhere on the net that some gulls have wingspans of up to 7'. So I made Dumbo a bit on the large side because I knew that unless I spent hundreds of dollars on machined parts I'd never get all the parts inside a bird as small as the ones around here, which have wingspans closer to 4'.

To set Dumbo up I had to furl the wings. This meant nesting the feathers so they would spread without getting tangled. Here you can see the furled and unfurled positions of the feathers, and how the servos operated.