Rose Float gets new home

Although New Year’s Day is more than eight months away, the Cal Poly Rose Float Team is already excited about the competition. This year’s project will be built inside a brand new lab building which is more organized than ever before.

“The big thing about the new lab is that it’s a lot more organized,” said Breana Dixon, a club member and industrial engineering senior. “There’s specific areas where we have all the machining, where it’s all protected so that other people that are working aren’t likely to get hit by flying bits of metal.”

Dixon said the team’s previous workspace posed many problems, like finding the correct part or tool for the job at hand. With the increased emphasis on organization, the new construction process will flow more smoothly. The lab was also designed specifically for the float’s dimensions; a higher ceiling on the new building will give the student workers a better angle for their work on the top of the float structure.

The team is also trying to recruit new members to help with the construction effort. Cal Poly Pomona’s rose float team, which creates half of the float every year, is nearly twice the size of San Luis Obispo’s.

“Right now the program is really small,” Dixon said. “We really want to get more people involved and help the program grow a little bit more.”

The San Luis Obispo team has 10 to 15 members who show up to its weekly meetings; the club is hoping to add more in the near future as the first stages of construction get underway later this month.

“Whoever knows how to weld, or is willing to learn, we can teach them,” construction leader and fifth-year mechanical engineering major J.R. Almanva said.

One of the reasons Pomona’s team is so much larger is because of their closer proximity to the Rose Parade. They only need to drive 40 miles down the freeway every December whereas the San Luis Obispo students have a 200- mile trip, towing a large steel frame behind them.

Before that can happen, though, the team has to iron out the design work. First they spend close to 10 weeks disassembling the frame down in Southern California before hauling it back to San Luis Obispo. After the Rose Parade theme is announced in January, the Cal Poly Rose Float club holds a contest for float ideas. Once the winner is chosen, the team then hires a professional artist to create a concept sketch for the design of the float. From that sketch, which is usually finished by April, the team spends their weekends making the drawing come to life. This year, the float will begin to take shape right after Open House, which is when the team expects to receive the finished sketch model.

Dixon said that, although the workspace problem is solved, the team still struggles with its small budget. The bigger, professional floats the Rose Parade features often have a lot of money behind them.

After construction is complete, the steel skeleton will make its journey down the coast, where it will be surfaced and decorated with flowers by students from both Cal Poly universities. People all over the country watch it roll down the streets of Pasadena on Jan. 1, and then the process begins anew.