Burning Man Raptor Project

What it is

I built a wearable articulated raptor from PVC pipe, rope bracing, and cable linkages on a backpack frame, with me inside making it walk. Moving neck, head, jaw, legs, and a counterbalanced tail.

It’s done. As of August 22 the whole creature is clad, painted, and lit: flame-striped body plates, a full set of teeth, and a pair of LED eyes that blink. The color is “pornj” (fluorescent pink plus fluorescent orange), because I’m camping with Disorient and also I love orange and pink.

The finished raptor on sawhorses in the living room: flame-striped pink and orange body plates, gray and orange legs, toothy head, and one glowing blue-violet LED eye

The name: still TBD. What’s Latin for “I made the head too big”?

Where it came from

Years ago I saw a video of Esmee Kramer’s Project Raptor: a giant walking raptor costume built from heat-formed PVC pipe, rope-braced trusses, and a seesaw spine on a backpack frame, with a bowden cable running the jaw. It has lived rent-free in my head ever since. Her build and this other dinosaur costume that either inspired or is derived from it both leave out the measurements and linkage closeups you’d need to easily make your own, so I held off starting this project until some friends talked me into going to Burning Man this year (they really didn’t need to do that much talking lol).

This project comes with a standing promise: I will publish everything so nobody else needs to feel the pain of pausing a youtube video and measuring the screen with calipers.

Software first, obviously

I’m really rusty at drawing and found I couldn’t sketch my way to a mechanism, so I built tools instead. Riglab (early July) simulates the linkages and answers whether the neck binds and the whole thing balances on my shoulders:

Riglab’s full Project Raptor example in the Top, Front, Side, and 3D views, with live mass, center-of-gravity, and seesaw-balance analysis

pvc-builder (a few days later) is where the creature actually got drawn: it infers fittings, simulates joints, and produces the cut list I took to the hardware store.

pvc-builder showing a wearable Project Raptor frame on a mannequin, with every pipe labeled and the fabrication cut list open

I’m vaguely aware that writing two pieces of software before making a single cut says something about me but I’m unsure what the statement is…

The build timeline

July 15. Pipe, fittings by the jar, a dress form wearing the pack harness, and the first dry-fit sections on the living room floor. The printed proportion sheets (drawn for a 5’6“ builder and covered in handwritten corrections) ran the show.

The living room as staging area: dry-fit PVC sections, a dress form wearing the black pack harness, and jars of fittings everywhere

Printed raptor proportion schematics stacked on the desk, covered in handwritten dimensions

July 19. Glue day. Dry-fit parts on a dress form became permanent structure, and the living room stopped pretending to be a living room.

The partially glued Raptor frame, harness, tools, and PVC cement spread across the dining-room floor

The process was part software, part paper, and part measurements scribbled wherever they’d fit:

A printed Raptor plan beside a hand-drawn frame cross-section, drill, clamps, aluminum plates, and PVC

July 21. The first leg walk test, and the moment this stopped being an abstract engineering exercise. The leg linkage rides my own leg and the foam profiles move like the animal:

(Not long after this video I decided the body needed to come down by a few inches, so I cut it down. Simulate all you want; some proportions only reveal themselves when the thing is strapped to you.)

July 25 and 26. The full skeleton came together: torso cage around the pack frame, the neck boom sweeping up, and the trussed tail out the back. Up on sawhorses it’s suddenly very large for a thing that has to live in a house with us.

The complete raptor skeleton standing on the floor, neck boom curving up, pack frame mounted in the torso cage

The frame up on sawhorses in profile, nose to tail across the room

The torso cage and tail truss from behind, harness hanging in the middle, sawhorses doing the creature’s standing for it

July 29. Head planning: ink over a printed photo of the real frame to work out the skull, jaw, and claws.

Pen sketch over a printed photo of the frame, drawing the skull, neck wraps, and leg profiles onto the real skeleton

July 31. Lights. Orange and pink 24V COB LED strips traced along the frame for a night test, with the first dark foam body plates hung in place. Power is a DeWalt tool battery through a boost converter, which works and also worries me: I’m half expecting the strips to nuke the batteries, so the current plan sketch involves an ESP32 running WLED, physical buttons, and some actual current limiting instead of vibes. This is the first photo where I could squint and see it on the playa at 2am.

Night lighting test: orange and pink COB LED strips tracing the frame, dark foam plates mounted, the whole rig glowing on sawhorses

The light test from behind: glowing outline over the tail truss with foam tail plates in silhouette

August 6. Two milestones in one day. The head is (mostly) done: foam-clad skull and jaw over the PVC frame, jaw linkage finished, and the brake cable that runs it wired.

The finished foam-clad raptor head and jaw sections over the PVC skull frame, brake cable in place, beside a frame section wearing the first coat of paint

And the design question got answered. I generated concept art until something felt right, and the answer was always going to be pink and orange (more on that below). The first plate got paint the same morning, though that particular coat’s days were numbered.

Concept art of the raptor look: hot pink body, orange accents, and a magenta spike crest

The first foam body plate painted hot pink with an orange center, drying on a workshop mat

August 18. Paint by numbers, literally. I had concept art for the head and a list of the 24 paints actually on the shelf, so I wrote a posterizer that snaps the image to that exact palette and emits one stencil sheet per paint, plus a little browser tool for reassigning paints and tuning how many regions it’s allowed to use. (The teeth read as background until the white threshold came down. Tuning was most of the evening.)

Concept art of the raptor head: flame stripes in pink and orange, a purple brow, and a row of teeth

The same head posterized down to the paints on hand, each region snapped to a real color

August 22. Finished. Every plate is on and painted, the teeth are in, and the eyes are a pair of concentric-ring LED arrays running WLED. I wrote led-eye-designer to do the eyes: a single-file web page that previews a blinking eye on the exact ring layout, lets me tune the stare time and lid speed, generates the ledmap.json, and installs the blink as WLED presets and a playlist so it runs on the controller with no computer attached. It mirrors to a second array on a second GPIO so both eyes blink in lockstep. The design that stuck is blue-violet with a movable pupil. This is the designer’s preview of it, sampled onto the real 61-LED layout:

The photo at the top of this page is the result.

The skin question

Between the frame and the paint sits the real open problem: what the skin should be. I generated concept sheets exploring what the same PVC skeleton could become with different foam treatments (a raptor, sure, but also a triceratops, a mosasaur, an owl beast, and a pelican, because concept art is cheap and commitment isn’t):

A concept sheet of eight dinosaur skins over the same PVC frame, with foam attachment ideas: Chicago screws, zip ties, and EVA thickness notes

A second concept sheet of stranger creatures on the same skeleton: giant heron, pelican, sailbird, pterodactyl, owl beast, mosasaur, insectoid, and fantasy beast

The working answer is layered EVA foam profiles (like the leg above), 6mm for shaping and 10mm where structure matters, plus thinner foam for ridges once it arrives. Attachment is where MOOP paranoia kicks in: the foam mounts with Ty-Rap zip ties, the kind with the stainless steel locking barb, because a nylon-pawl zip tie that bakes in the desert sun and lets go turns a body plate into tumbleweed.

For clean pass-throughs where a tie or cord runs through foam, I designed two-part printed through-hulls in vibecad: a washered inner tube that seats through the sheet and an outer sleeve that locks over it, in threaded and push-on fir-tree variants.

The vibecad interface showing the through-hull build plate: six telescoped grommet halves in threaded and ridged variants on the 3D canvas, chat panel at right

Three orange 3D-printed through-hull parts on dark foam: one assembled pair and the two halves, one smooth and one ridged

The pornj raptor-alike won the concept sheet, but the owl beast haunts me a little.

The color is pornj

I’m camping with Disorient, and Disorient has an official color: pornj, which their wiki defines as “a bright happy color halfway between Pink and Orange, diminishing neither.” Fluorescent pink plus fluorescent orange (Pantone 806 and 804, for those keeping score), coined in 2004 during a build session for the original Disorient sign. So the raptor isn’t pink because I like pink, though I do. The dinosaur has a camp uniform.

My first paint pass didn’t survive contact with judgment: too moopy. Paint that doesn’t bond properly flakes, and flakes on the playa become MOOP (Matter Out of Place), the one souvenir you’re required not to leave. So that coat is coming off: sand the frame until painter’s tape lifts nothing, scuff, reprime, and do it right.

The proper stack (arrived at after a long argument with ChatGPT about paint chemistry) is actually two stacks. The EVA foam gets heat-sealed, flexible-primed (Rosco FlexBond), based in white, brushed with fluorescent acrylics in 2 to 4 thin coats (fluorescents are translucent, so white underneath or you’re painting seventeen coats onto a dirty-looking dinosaur), and clear-coated with something that stays flexible.

The PVC frame gets scuffed, plastic-primed, and painted with plastic-bonding paint, with the fluorescent areas primed white and finished in blacklight-reactive neon plus a flexible gloss clear.

The blacklight-reactive part matters: Burning Man at night is a UV environment (and I have UV lights I’ll be carrying), and the creature should glow like it belongs there. Everything ends with a tape test, because a clear coat over loose paint just converts small flakes into larger, more efficient flakes.

That stack is what’s on the creature now, and the stripes came out of the stencil sheets above.

What it cost

I mined my order history so you don’t have to wonder. About $1,300 so far: roughly $1,100 through Amazon since early July, plus about $200 at Home Depot for the pipe and cement themselves.

Where the money wentApproximate, covering the Amazon orders and the Home Depot pipe run.

Structure$535 41%
Paint$270 21%
Skin$195 15%
Tools$185 14%
Lights and rigging$110 8%

Where it went, roughly:

Structure: ~$535. The aluminum pack frame ($98, the single most expensive item), a small mountain of furniture-grade fittings, snap-on saddles, fiberglass rods, and the Home Depot pipe run.
Paint, both stacks: ~$270. The fluorescent acrylics, primers, varnishes, brushes, and rollers, including the first stack that’s now getting sanded off. Tuition.
Skin: ~$195. Half-inch puzzle mats (the 10mm body foam), 2mm sheets for ridges, foam clay, contact cement, foam glue, and the M6 hardware that holds it all on.
Tools: ~$185. Two foam cutters (hot knife and hot wire), a pipe cutter, a heat gun, punches, and drill bits. These survive the project.
Lights and rigging: ~$110. COB strips, the boost converter, bungee by the hundred feet, paracord, and the brake cable.

For a creature vocabulary built on “cheap pipe and rope,” well, the pipe and rope were in fact cheap. It’s everything that touches them that adds up.

August 23 note: it ended up being another couple hundred dollars…

The Doloresaurus moment

Somewhere in all this I discovered that Doloresaurus exists: Trevor Mead built a magnificent dinosaur (its official bio involves disco, house music, and running from children), and it already goes to Burning Man. I had a brief, genuine moment of despair. Partly the deflating feeling that my version is less cool, and partly the worry that people would think I ripped off someone’s idea.

Then I realized how ridiculous that was. Nobody owns “dinosaur at Burning Man.” Two home-built dinosaurs on the same playa isn’t a controversy, it’s a genre. Better: it’s an army. Doloresaurus lives in Esmee Kramer’s dino army gallery, where she shows off builds her Project Raptor inspired and openly recruits new ones. Mine descends directly from hers, so once it’s finished I’m reaching out to enlist.

Meanwhile I reached out to Trevor on Instagram for tips, because the man clearly knows things about keeping a dinosaur alive in the desert that I’m about to learn the hard way. He’s been super helpful and encouraging.

What’s next

The playa. It needs a name before it gets there, and it needs to survive dust, heat, and enthusiasm once it does. After that: the promised measurements and linkage closeups, and enlisting in the dino army.