My Own Stegosaurus

So there for a short time I was a director of a company and once was required to design art for our office space. You know to perk it up a bit and give it some pizzazz. Just out of curiosity I figured I’d look up how much it was to get a dinosaur skeleton. Turns out that it costs in the region of £100,000 on up depending on how recognisable the dinosaur is. That far exceeded my budget of about £100 (notice there isn’t an extra  “,000” on my budget”).

Although I remembered that you can get plaster casts of existing skeletons. Excited I looked up prices for that type skeleton and as it is significantly less but still in the region of £25,000.

So I applied some thinking, and by that I mean I spent some of the budget on beer to help the creative juices flow and I tackled the idea. And the beer worked...do you remember those plywood kits you’d pick up at the natural history museum  and you could build your own dinosaur skeleton? Well I did and I figured that I could just get one of those and scale it up in plywood and make a life size version.

So buying myself a kit of a Stegosaurus I found out it used 3mm plywood. Knowing that a full grown version stood about 2 meters tall and reached about 3.5 meters that would mean I need to scale up the plywood by a factor of 12. As it just so happens plywood commonly comes in 18mm thickness. So two 18mm plywood cut pieces sandwiched and bolted together give us the required thickness. Scale all sizes up by a factor of twelve and we’ve got something fairly awesome. Costing it out it still comes out to something roughly about £350 for the required plywood and bolts.

But I had a better idea why not go a bit bigger. Each of the blades on the stegosaurus’ back could be coloured. I initially thought perhaps I could get them dipped in plastic or perhaps several coats to spray paint. I could go rainbow across the back of the dinosaur and it would be awesome. But then the alcohol jumped in and came up with a good idea and was like, why not use coloured acrylic sheets to make the blades pop.

As a final bit of awesome sauce I figured I could buy myself a huge pair of googly eyes for the head of my stegosaurus, by this time in my brainstorming she had been named Susan.

I never did get to build my dinosaur, but given £1,700 I think I could make something even more awesome than a real Stegosaurus skeleton. Now all I need is to build a company, that has its own offices that has enough room in the atrium or the foyer to erect a 2 meter by 3.5 meter Stegosaurus.

So if you have any lucrative business ideas, just let me know.