Just Finishing Takes Wizardry : Rose Parade: As floats become more spectacular and high-tech, breakdowns become more challenging. It’s no longer a job for a guy with a wrench and starter cables.

Back when Rose Parade floats were little more than trucks blanketed with chicken wire and flowers, most parade-day breakdowns could be handled with a wrench or some starter cables.

But the flower facades of the modern floats usually conceal a spaghetti tangle of hydraulic lines and electronic circuitry. When one of today’s 50,000-pound animated behemoths malfunctions, it can take 15 hours of trouble-shooting just to find the busted widget that caused the problem.

According to float builders, it’s the price you pay for all the razzmatazz, with those huge gesturing King Kongs and head-wagging dinosaurs.

“Put a massive floral sculpture in a parade, with no rehearsals and no retakes, and there are risks,” said float builder Rick Chapman, a harried-looking man whose recent schedule of sleepless nights is beginning to show.

Showmanship requires creative engineering, which can lead to breakdowns, most float builders concede.

This is finger-crossing time. The floats have all been road-tested, probed for defects and inspected. But if the 104th Rose Parade follows the pattern of recent years, about a quarter of the 57 floats will still experience breakdowns--though most of them will be so minor as to be unnoticeable to parade viewers.

The Rose Parade, which will step off down Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena shortly after 8 a.m. on New Year’s Day, promises to be a more tranquil event than the last one, which was troubled by threats of disruptions and an acrimonious dispute between the Pasadena City Council and Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block.

On parade day there were demonstrations against Co-Grand Marshal Cristobal Colon, a direct descendant of Christopher Columbus, but the parade was largely free of disturbances.

Despite hints this week from black groups that they might demonstrate against the overwhelmingly white male membership of the Tournament of Roses, the buildup for this parade has focused largely on floats and bands.

Along with the floats, there will be 21 marching bands and 29 equestrian groups marching past an expected crowd of 1 million.

Six of the floats will be from Chapman’s Azusa-based firm, Festival Artists, including an 84-foot-high stack of clowns, from which bungee jumpers will dive, and a rolling magic trick, with a busload of youngsters repeatedly disappearing.

To Rose Parade insiders, a float is basically a 55-by-17-foot chassis with adornments. The challenge is to get it through the 5.5-mile parade route without breakdowns or risks to life or limb.

That means it has to make the right turn off Orange Grove Boulevard, glide down the hill by the Norton Simon Museum, traverse five miles of straightaway on Colorado Boulevard and duck down to less than 17 feet, 4 inches to squeeze through the 210 Freeway underpass at Sierra Madre Boulevard, before coming to a rest at Victory Park.

On rare occasions, the risks apply to more than just machinery.

Last New Year’s Day, parade viewers applauded when a mule team pulling the Farmer’s Insurance float, a 55-foot-long depiction of early American buildings, broke into a trot as it rounded the corner of Orange Grove Boulevard. But the delight turned to horror as the float, on the parade route’s steepest slope, veered toward a group of viewers jammed onto the sidewalk at the bottom of the hill.

Finally, the float pulled to a halt in a narrow opening between the audience and another float.

“We were real lucky we got squeezed into the hole there,” said Santa Clarita mule driver Sam Smiser a few days after the parade. “I don’t think I could have done it again if I tried.” There were four minor injuries, mostly scrapes and bruises caused by people trying to get out of the way.

Parade officials at first thought that the mules had gone out of control. But a quick investigation showed that the problem came from the failure of the battery that powered the float’s brakes. The mules, which had scurried to keep from being overrun by the float, actually slowed the rolling mass by digging into the pavement, officials acknowledged.

“The brakes weren’t functional, and it was total animal power that brought it under control,” said Michael Riffey, chairman of the Tournament of Roses float construction committee.

This year, the tournament is requiring animal-drawn floats to have added warning systems to signal when power systems are in danger of malfunctioning, as well as backup hand brakes.

Inspectors spot most safety problems long before the parade, tournament officials insist. Each float must go through a series of bow-to-stern examinations, including two road tests. A few days before New Year’s Day, the float, along with everybody who will ride on it in the parade, is taken out of the work yard under the eyes of tournament inspectors.

But as sure as sunshine in Pasadena on New Year’s Day, there will be some snafus, tournament officials say.

Most problems are as simple as a flat tire or a balky carburetor, which can be dealt with quickly by the tournament’s squad of eight mechanics. At worst, a float is rendered immobile, becoming a flower-draped Rock of Gibraltar that has to be ingloriously towed.

There will be 42 tow trucks spread out along the 5.5 miles, ready to move in at a signal from a parade official, said Tom McEntire, chairman of parade operations.

It’s in the nature of mechanical things to break down, contends Chapman, guiding a visitor through Festival Artists’ busy work yard.

Volunteers buzz around the detached limbs and heads of float figures, covering them with bits of palm bark or pampas grass. Workers tinker with the machinery that will propel a quadruple Ferris wheel or the tower of clowns, the Rose Parade’s tallest-ever float.

There is an air of secrecy around the hulk of this year’s Arco float, the one with the disappearing school bus. Magician Ray Pierce developed the trick that, if all goes well, will be performed about 200 times along the parade route, with a huge prestidigitating rabbit waving a wand to make a bus disappear and reappear from a large box.

But there is always the possibility of a New Year’s foul-up, Chapman concedes. “If we lost all our power modes, we’d have nothing,” he says with a haunted look. “We’d have a 50-foot rabbit.”

It could be a bummer in front of a television audience that tournament officials expect to reach 300 million around the world this year.

“We tell our clients their necks are out there,” Chapman says. “You have to know there are risks. Despite the fact that we’re good at what we do, something’s going to go wrong someday.”

Festival Artists’ biggest fiasco came four years ago when its huge tropical island float, representing the soft drink Slice, didn’t make it out of the starting blocks on Orange Grove Boulevard. The extravagant float, complete with giant tiki masks, 23,000 orchids and a 30-foot water flume with Polynesian swimmers, developed steering problems.

“We discovered a manufacturer’s error,” Chapman says. “A part of the steering mechanism had been welded in backward. It was devastating to a big company like Pepsi-Cola (makers of Slice) that they couldn’t put their float in the parade.”

Rose Parade veterans say the glitches started to appear in the late 1970s, when float builders, impelled by the demands of television to provide a spectacle, started using complicated hydraulic systems to power animation.

“Years ago, they used to pay somebody $10 to lie under the float and crank a crank,” said McEntire.

Typically, a New Year’s Day float snafu is more of a public relations disaster for a sponsor, who may have sunk as much as $350,000 into a failed extravaganza, than anything that directly affects the audience.

McEntire, who worked as a parade mechanic before becoming a tournament official, says the failure rate of Rose Parade floats compares favorably with, say, the cars in the Indianapolis 500, only about 30% of which complete the race.

There are no shakedown cruises for a Rose Parade float, McEntire adds. They arrive at the start of the parade virtually at the moment of completion, he says.

“The only time they’re really complete, with all of their flowers on, is during the parade.”

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