It took more than two tons of steel to make the massive eagle that will be shipped south of the border later this month to adorn a new rollercoaster at Dollywood, a theme park in Pigeon Gorge, Tennessee, owned by country music star Dolly Parton.
Metal sculptor Kevin Stone of Metal Animation Studio Inc. in Chilliwack, B.C., was commissioned by Dollywood to build the giant $250,000 bald eagle, which stands about two stories high and has a wing span of 14.6 metres.
Poised as though swooping down on its prey, the eagle’s head, tail, and talons are made of shiny stainless steel while the body and wings are rusted to give the effect of a bald eagle’s brown plumage.
“I also do car restoration and stuff, so rust is my enemy, and so to actually just leave it and let it rust and to even to water it down and accelerate the rusting effect to give it that brown colour has been something new for me,” Stone says.
The work, which Dollywood is billing as the largest eagle sculpture in the world, is the third in a series of eagles Stone has made and is a good fit for Dollywood’s rustic ambience.
“They wanted to make sure that their eagle was the world’s largest eagle and I let them know that I had one here for sale, but they didn’t want a stainless or a shiny metal finish on theirs,” he says.
Stone says it normally takes him a year to complete a piece this size, but he’s had just six months to get the Dollywood eagle done. The bird, which includes the individual creation and welding of thousands of feathers, is engineered to withstand 170 km winds.
The eagle will be erected over the entrance to the park’s new $20 million Wild Eagle steel wing rollercoaster, which rises 21 stories high and is the first of its kind in the U.S., according to the Dollywood website.
Sentinel
In a press release, Dollywood’s construction director Brian Dudash said Stone’s “rugged and natural” sculpture will “stand as a sentinel to beckon would-be riders to Wild Eagle [and] also celebrate our Smoky Mountains heritage.”
