http://www.roadsideamerica.com/tips/getAttraction.php?tip_AttractionNo==4427

It’s near Montrose, South Dakota, called the Porter Sculpture Park. There are quite a few large sculptures there.

You can still get the puzzles. I bought the ones I worked from on Amazon.

How big? The biggest piece is about half the length of the body. If you blew the thing up so that the largest piece just fit on a 4×8 the finished dino would be close to 14′ long. I’ve thought about it, but there are a couple of problems.

It turns out the engineering starts to matter. We used 3/4 pressure treated plywood so it could live outside without needed a sealer. In the bigger models the weight of the model was already becoming too much for the design of the joints. We did a T-Rex, but when you stand it up the ankle and the hip just snap. So if we went bigger, we’d need to use a stronger material or provide an armature.

Also, with the exception of something that is in this proportion, changing the scale pretty much means redrafting a large part of the file. The existing tool paths will work as long as the scale change yields a slot that will work for the stock. So if I made it bigger and didn’t want to redraft all of the joints the stock would also have to get thicker. Not sure I would want to go thicker than 3/4, and there might be a diminishing point of returns engineeringwise.

I have thought about scaling down and changing material, maybe down 2/3 of this to use 1/4″ aluminum plate, or 1/2 to use 3/8″ clear acrylic. Both of those would be doable without significantly more CAD work. Might be fun.

There are even more pics here: http://mydaddidntliketheurl.blogspot.com/2007/08/dino-workshop.html

the group I worked with over the summer had a “Dino Night.” There are process pics here from that event. You can get an idea of scale and see the T-Rex and the Spinosaur too.