When one is challenged by their co-workers to make an electric, drivable unicorn, it often gets waved away as a sillyidea, but if you are a coder and devotee to the maker movement, you accept it as a challenge.
Charlyn (@chardane), brought a stuffed unicorn rocking horse (Rocky) into the office one day simply because she thought it was too cute not to share. Since this amused her coworkers, they suggested that she add wheels to it and make it electric. Charlyn, who loves to make stuff including projects that involve circuitry, 3D printing, crafts and microcontrollers took the challenge and turned Rocky the Rocking Horse into Electro Rocky: the Electric Unicorn Vehicle.
At first Charlyn tried to build the motorized fella using the simplest items available, such as a hardwood dolly zip tied to a hoverboard, but didn't have the desired results. She quickly headed back to the drawing board and drew up plans for something a bit more extensive. Drawing out her design let Charlyn determine what items she needed, how much and to also document her build for future use.
Charlyn stumbled upon FORMUFIT and found that Furniture Grade PVC was perfect for her build and was able to get all of the parts her design needed, and then some. Her design still uses a hoverboard as the mobility engine, but now the PVC frame acts as a sort tilting access point that lets you sit on the unicorn and use the PVC frame as handles and main supports. The front support wheels are standard casters sitting inside of Caster Pipe Caps.
Cutting pipes with her hacksaw, she was able to create a chassis for Rocky to sit upon, and modified the pipes to accept brass flanges and pass-through bolts. Using some off-the shelf T-plate connectors, she was able to build a ‘rocking’ mechanism for the hoverboard.
To connect everything together, her design uses brass screws that have had their heads countersunk into the pipe to keep everything flush. The brass and black colors add a level of sophistication, suitable only for a majestic unicorn.
Once built everything, she reattached her unicorn friend, added a phone holder (of course), garnished the chassis with flowers and set off on a magical, mobile adventure.
This is the type of maker-movement creativity we here at FORMUFIT absolutely love, and is why we started the company. We’ve got Charlyn in our FORMUFIT Twitter feed so we can see more of her creations in the future.
Check out Charlyn’s Twitter feed @chardane for some cool stuff. You can view her instructions on how she built Electro Rocky on her blog here and you can see some of her image highlights and built notes on her Intsagram feed here.
