How to Make Plated Armor for a Horse's Ass

All For a Mardi Gras Day Part 2: How to Make Plated Armor for a Horse’s Ass

            The plan was to rebuild the horse.  In its first year it had been a steampunk Trojan Horse. Its revelers were not hidden, and they had no plans to sack in the city, but the surprise of intention remained the same.  To surprise, to cast wonder, to turn adults into children, engaging their curiosity and love of novelty and imagination, without disallowing them the privileges of being adult, such as drinking and partying in the streets of your city.  This was Mardi Gras.
           This year, the Krewe of Ragnarock hopes to engage that same wondrous spirit, to abstract the experience of a party with the surprise cross-imagery of life-death celebrations, mocking the idea of definitive endings. The horse will be the Pale Horse from Revelations, the forerunner of the End of Days, but with a fun Dia de los Muertos twist. The horse was intended to intimidate, to scare the religiously weak, and then delight everyone with sugary skull-colors and a festive spirit.  Naturally, it would require colorful armor.  

            I showed up to my first krewe-build day hungover.   I had too much wine and daiquiri the night before and struggled to perform basic tasks that morning like locking my bike or opening doors.  I wanted to make a good impression on my peers who were worked in engineering, construction, and design.  But New Orleans' nights sometimes have their way with you and reduce you to a fumbling vessel.    I showed up early to confess my diminished state to Porter, the head constructioneer, a builder of things, with oak branches for arms.  He wielded powertools like they were dinnerware (but more safely) and exhibited a casual comfort around dangerous tools exhibited by people who spend a lot of time around dangerous tools.   On my bike ride over I imagined him asking me to use torches and buzz saws and esoteric cutting machines I had never heard of before.  I imagined splaying my hand into five pieces. Or maybe just my slicing off my smallest fingers. 

            The horse's head loomed over the top of the gate while I struggled to lock my bike up again.  I confessed to Porter, “My mental and physical faculties are compromised, so if you have something easy, you know, maybe I could do that and warm up to something more.”

            “Ok,” he said, putting down a propane torch.  “Have you used a grinder before?”
            "No."
            "You want to cut some metal?"

            He put a plastic face shield and plugged in the grinder, a tool with a circular face like a sander but with sharper edges and more torque.  A garbage bag in a corner revealed a few dozen empty espresso bean cans, each the size of a waste paper basket.  He pulled one out then stabilized it with his foot and began to cut the top off with edge of the disc.  Hundreds of sparks volleyed against his face and legs.  Hot metal on metal screams.  It is no birdsong.  He cut the first can and then took off the mask and handed me the grinder.  
        "How about it?" he asked.  
         This was my nightmare.  But I still had some control over my body, I told myself, and finished my third liter of water that morning.  I was raised to respect power tools’ ability to sever digits, but not to fear them because, well, they’re useful.  If I wasn't willing to risk a finger, then what use would I be in building a war horse? How could I proerly mock death on Mardi Gras day and ride the horse with any sense of pride??  What would the trojan soldiers have said?  They would call me a coward, or some part of genitalia.  I hoisted my wool socks to cover my own legs and cut the tops and bottoms of fifteen cans.  I maintained all my extremeties. But when asked to bevel the tips of a bundle of PVC pipe, I gave the grinder to someone else.  Instead, I took the propane torch, ready for another task.

Porter and Megan.  Mama and Papa Horse.

           

How to make armor plates

1: Use a grinder to cut the top and bottom of thin aluminum cans. 

2: Use garden shears to cut the cylinders and lay them flat as a sheet of metal.

3: Cut cardboard into desired shape and then trace it with a marker onto sheet of metal.  In our case, the shape was something like a large tear drop.

4: Use garden shears again to cut out shapes.

5: Paint armor plates desired color.  We painted ours turquoise blue, red, and then left the other third silver.  We painted a black border trim around each plate.

6: Layer the plates on the skin (canvas cloth) of the horse’s ass like roofing tiles. 

7: Power drill them into the canvas and corrugated plastic material underneath.   

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