This Dinosaur Contraption

This Dinosaur Contraption Is Proof Engineers Make the Best Costumes

A Dutch engineering student constructed a dinosaur costume with life-like movements.

By Jennifer Leman

• In her free time, Esmée Kramer, a network and engineering systems student at The Hague University of Applied Sciences, constructed a fully mobile raptor costume.
• The body works like a seesaw—both the neck and tail are roughly the same weight—and she acts as the fulcrum.
• The most challenging part to build, she noted in a LinkedIn post, was the head.

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The costume looks like something out of Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks.

A network and engineering systems student at The Hague University of Applied Sciences named Esmée Kramer crafted a giant, mobile raptor costume made from PVC pipe and foam. She posted a YouTube video titled “Project Raptor: My mechanical dinosaur costume” about the design.

The skeleton of the dinosaur is made from a combination ⅝ and ¾ inch PVC pipes, which she heated and bent at certain points to create a range of motions. In a post on LinkedIn, she explains that the costume works a little bit like a seesaw, where the tail and neck can swing up and down while she is the fulcrum.

Pushing and pulling the neck, which is about the same weight as the tail, leans the body forward or backward. To secure the neck to the body, she used a conduit box, duct tape, and elastic rope. The tail, she said, has two inflection points and is fortified with a fiberglass rod and a length of old garden hose.

The most challenging part of the build was designing the costume so that the head could move in different directions. So, Kramer crafted a steering handle that mirrored the rotation points of the head and used a brake cable to open and close the raptor’s jaws.

She wrapped up the post, which was published in May, saying, "it's always hard to say when a project like this is ever really finished." Let’s hope she took it out for a spin on Halloween.