Rose Parade Float to Debut at Festival of Balloons

Keep an eye out for your 2013 Tournament of Roses float in its beginning stages in the  parade Wednesday. 

You can also catch it before or after the parade: 

"Due to our overall size and to avoid traversing narrow residential streets, we will be staging west of Diamond and Mission prior to the parade at about 6:30 a.m.," said SPTOR Construction Chair Chris Colbourn.

"And then we will park to the west of on Park Avenue for display before heading back to the lot."

Sailing The Sea of Knowledge (to your right) is the winning float concept chosen to represent South Pas in the 2013 Tournament of Roses Parade January 1.

It was submitted by South Pasadena resident and college student: Matthew Whaling. 

Here's additional info on the design progress via Colburn: 

We started construction in April and our main focus has been getting operator systems in place, the ship’s rocking and over-height mechanisms for the three masts built (our next phase in the process) and then in August we will we move on to framing out the ship and covering the surfaces with sculpted metal and plywood.

We had a minor setback with being required by the Tournament Technical Inspectors to reroute some of the hydraulic hoses on our main drive system, but we replaced the problematic hoses and are ready to test the repairs (on our first road trip since fixing the issues on June 20th) in the Festival of Balloons Parade. 

The preview of the rocking mechanism on July 4th is the first phase of our animation for this float which mill make the ship appear to crest the waves of the open book.

This will be the first time that the chassis will appear in the July 4th parade with any type of major construction completed; we have laid out our full Rose Parade footprint of the 50 foot long by 18 foot wide book and nearly completed the heavy structure required to make the rocking mechanism and form the base of the sailing ship and it’s three mast-lowering mechanisms (that will allow us to traverse any overhead hazards to and from the parade and clear the freeway bridge at Sierra Madre and the 210). 

We are shooting for the end of October to switch gears and to focus on detail items, painting and dry decoration with seeds and other organic items.

If all goes as planned, we will be done with all of the dry decoration before Christmas, which will allow us all to focus on the floral elements and make the finished float really shine on January 1, 2013 and hopefully bring home another award for South Pasadena.

South Pasadena took home the  for its "When Life Gives You Lemons" float design in 2012.

To help with this year's construction, visit the SPTOR Builder's Facebook page HERE.

Patch Asks: Will you be at South Pasadena's Wednesday?