Large Dinosaur Model Installation Guide

Installation day is decided weeks earlier, by things that look like admin: whether the pad has cured, whether the crane can reach, whether the truck can turn around. Every difficult install we've had was a site problem that was visible on paper long before it was visible on site.

This is the sequence for a large model — five metres and up — and the checks that belong to each stage. Small pieces skip most of it; the pad and the power still apply.

Stage one: the pad

Everything starts here and nothing can be rushed later. A large animatronic is not a static object: the drives shift load backwards and forwards, so the pad takes a dynamic load as well as the static weight. A slab sized only for the static figure will crack at the corners over a season.

Get the design load from the supplier before pouring, not after. Then add what your ground actually needs — a compacted gravel base under the slab for soft ground, a steel spreading plate if the piece sits on a deck or a rooftop, and edge thickening where the feet sit.

Two details that get skipped and then cause trouble: drainage so water doesn't stand against the base frame, and a conduit from the pad to where the control cabinet will live. Pouring the conduit in is a ten-minute job before the concrete sets; chasing it through a finished pad is a day.

Cure time is not negotiable. A pad loaded before it's cured keeps moving for months, and the symptom looks like a mechanism fault — the animal drifts off its marks and the drives fight each other. If the schedule is tight, that's a reason to start the pad earlier, not to load it sooner.

Stage two: access and lifting

Walk the route before the truck is booked. Service road width, overhead cables, low branches, gate widths, and the turning circle at the end. A container that can't turn around means unloading on the road, which is a different permit, a different cost, and sometimes not allowed at all.

For lifting, the question is reach rather than capacity. Most large sections are well within a modest crane's rating; the problem is the radius — the crane has to stand somewhere, and that somewhere is usually occupied by something you can't move. On tight sites a telehandler does the work a crane can't reach.

Lifting points are marked on the frame. Use those and only those. Straps around the neck or the tail of a skinned section will crush the foam under the silicone, and the damage doesn't show until the skin sags a month later.

Stage three: mechanical assembly

Large pieces arrive in sections — legs, hips, body, neck, head, tail — and bolt together in a documented order. Follow the order. Assembling the head to the neck before the neck is on the body means lifting the whole assembly twice, and the second lift is the one that damages something.

Step	Check before moving on
Base frame on pad	Shimmed level, anchor bolts torqued, no gap under any foot
Legs and hips	All bolts fitted finger-tight, then torqued in the diagrammed sequence
Body shell	Frame alignment pins seated; body sits without forcing
Neck and head	Neck drive connected and moved by hand through full travel before power
Tail	Swing clearance verified against the marked arc
Skin and teeth	Seams closed, no skin pinched in a joint, teeth torqued

Move every joint by hand through its full travel before anything is powered. It takes ten minutes and it catches the problems that would otherwise trip a limit switch on the first power-up — a cable routed across a hinge, a skin fold trapped in a shoulder, a tail weight bearing on the frame.

Stage four: power and control

The cabinet needs a supply that matches its rating — most builds run on 110 V or 220 V AC with the voltage set at the factory, so confirm which before the electrician arrives. Give it its own circuit with a breaker you can isolate, and earth it properly. Sharing a circuit with site lighting is how a nuisance trip becomes a service call.

Pneumatic builds add a compressor. It needs to be somewhere it can be heard without annoying anyone — a service room, not beside the exhibit — with the line run to the animal. Drain the receiver regularly; water in the line is the most common cause of a lazy cylinder.

Outdoor cabinets get a fiberglass enclosure over them. A painted steel box looks fine for a year and then rusts from the inside along the seams, and you don't find out until a board fails in the wet season.

Stage five: commissioning

Commissioning is where the motion gets its feel. Run each joint through its range, set the speeds, and check that the programmed curves don't hit the mechanical stops. Then run the full sequence for a couple of hours and watch for heat at the drives, unusual noise, and any joint that's drifted off its position.

Level the audio on site with the exhibit in its final position. A roar set at the factory will be wrong in a courtyard with hard walls. And set the trigger sensors so they fire when a visitor is at the viewpoint, not when they're still walking toward it.

Before the crew leaves, get three things in writing or on video: the as-built wiring diagram, the joint calibration values, and a short walkthrough of the daily and monthly checks. Those three are what your own maintenance team will need in month seven when something drifts.

The short version

Pad first and cured, access walked, sections lifted on marked points, assembled in order, joints tested by hand before power, cabinet on its own circuit with an enclosure, then commissioning with the audio levelled on site. Every one of those is cheap to do in sequence and expensive to fix out of sequence.

We've been building and installing animatronic pieces since 2015, and we'd rather review your site plan before the pad is poured than solve a foundation problem afterwards. Send us the layout, the ground conditions and the access route, and we'll tell you what to change while it's still a drawing.