Testing of the Rose Floats Puts Engineers on Parade

If all goes as planned, eight draft horses weighing a ton each will pull Neptune along Colorado Boulevard and a 98-foot caterpillar will attempt the Macarena.

The world expects such fanciful images New Year’s Day from the Rose Parade.

But to give the public its spectacle of imagination, the crews that build the parade floats spend their year focused on feats of engineering, forming fantasy with a mix of brains, beasts and machines.

It isn’t easy. The largest floats weigh about 45,000 pounds--about as much as nine Chevrolet Suburbans--and stretch to over 100 feet. From the wheels up, they are designed from scratch.

“Some people think we get an old car, cut the roof off and build over it. It’s anything but that,” said Chris Lofthouse, vice president of the Phoenix Decorating Co., which is building 24 of this year’s 54 floats.

The first two weeks of December is the time for floats to be tested--before the thousands of volunteers arrive to glue on the mosaics of flower petals, plants and seeds that color the floats. This is when float builders find the glitches that might spoil the parade day magic.

Like the other day, when they tested the six-speaker, stadium-rated sound system that will provide the beat for the Macarena caterpillar on the streets of Pasadena. “It set off car alarms all around. It definitely was rattling the windows [of nearby houses],” said Phoenix spokesman Larry Palmer.

On Tuesday, the Phoenix crew tried out the last of its 24 floats, the horse-drawn Neptune trailed by the Charlie the Tuna mascot of Star-Kist Foods. The spin around the Rose Bowl parking lot went smoothly, no doubt pleasing the H.J. Heinz Co., which sponsored the nearly $300,000 float.

During the test of last year’s Heinz float, one of the Percheron geldings backed up when the float was parked and snapped its wooden hitch. “It might as well have been made out of balsa wood,” recalled driver John Dryer.

A steel hitch had to be fabricated in the two weeks before the parade, and is being used this year to pull the 25,000-pound float.

The Heinz float is one of only two horse-drawn entries in this year’s parade. The Percheron horses, the same type used by the company on delivery teams until the 1920s, are a company mascot known as “The Heinz Hitch.”

The Heinz float, propelled by centuries-old technology, may be less troublesome than motor-driven entries. Tow trucks typically end up pulling a few floats each year. Phoenix spokesman Palmer said engines sometimes overheat because the floats move at just 2.5 mph along the five-mile parade route.

A task more complicated than driving a team of eight horses may be coaxing the eight front legs of a mechanical caterpillar into the motions of the Macarena.

To pull that off, the Phoenix builders rigged the legs to hydraulic pumps powered by a four-cylinder Nissan truck engine.

Lofthouse said the company often brings in engineers from other industries to help with more complex floats. The Rose Parade floats are larger and more complicated than those used in other parades partly because builders can tap the expertise of engineers employed in the region’s aerospace, amusement park and oil companies.

The Sunkist caterpillar float rolls on seven and nine-foot wheels. Among the five-person crew will be an operator who will concentrate on controlling the legs as he listens to the music. Ultimately the caterpillar will perform the dance only as well as the operator.

“It’ll be trying to do it, kind of like the rest of us,” Lofthouse said.