Home to roost!

Engineering apprentices bring mechanical gannet to life

Engineering apprentices from Edinburgh College dealt with an unusual animal rescue operation – they used their skills to bring a feathery robot back to life!

Daniel Dewar and Sean Devine worked with their lecturer Terry Healey to perform extensive repairs on the Scottish Seabird Centre’s mechanical gannet, which is on display at the Centre in North Berwick.

The Seabird Centre asked the students to repair its broken bird so it could head back into action and continue raising money for the charity and educating visitors.

The fabrication and welding apprentices used their skills to shape replacement parts and weld and braze them into place on the intricate bird structure.

Now fixed and back home at the Seabird Centre’s Discovery Centre, the gannet springs to life when a donation is made, making the distinctive gannet call, rotating to show the inner workings of its skeletal structure and revealing a metal fish struggling in its beak. It is ideally located close to the Centre’s interactive Bass Rock cameras, where visitors can zoom in on the real life gannets on the Bass Rock, the world’s largest Northern gannet colony.

Daniel and Sean are on the second year of a four-year modern apprenticeship in fabrication and welding. They visit the college’s Midlothian Campus in Dalkeith two days a week to receive training they can apply to their job roles at Scotia Security.

Daniel said: “This has been a great chance to put the skills we have learned through our course into practice. This was the first time we’ve done a job for somebody that will be seen outside the college, and you take a lot of pride in your work.”

Ross Milligan, the college’s curriculum manager for Engineering, said: “This was an exciting and unusual opportunity for our students to work with the Seabird Centre. The students and Terry have worked hard to refurbish, repair and get the mechanism working again, and now it is as good as it was when it first built. Our fabrication and welding students usually work on water tanks, spiral staircases, gates and railings, but projects like these give them a taste of the more unusual ways they could use these skills in the future.”

Tom Brock OBE, Chief Executive of the Scottish Seabird Centre, said: “It is brilliant to have our kinetic gannet sculpture back in operation. It has always been a very popular attraction. The Bass Rock has had a phenomenal year, being named the world’s largest Northern gannet colony and also BBC Countryfile Magazine’s Nature Reserve of the Year. To have our mechanical gannet back in the Centre is the ideal way to celebrate.

“We would like to say a huge thank you to Terry, Daniel and Sean for all their hard work. We are very grateful to Edinburgh College, and will look forward to collaborating with them on future projects.”

The gannet was originally designed by Jim Bond, an artist who specialises in kinetic sculpture, and was described by Terry as like something from TV’s Scrapheap Challenge, as the artist had welded die nuts into the skeletal structure, used a spoon in the working mechanism and used bolts to create the feet.

The bird has been entertaining visitors to the Scottish Seabird Centre since it opened in 2000 and is now back in its rightful home.