Hopefully they are still visible and my work wasn’t in vain.

For now though, you’ll have to make do with a view from google maps (links to google maps).

The weather is still too wet for me to finish the kiwi and on top of that, I went into hospital last week and had my Appendix removed.  The net result – I’m now flying back to the UK two weeks later than planned, but not late enough for the grass to dry out.

I’m planning on coming back to New Zealand for Christmas this year so hopefully I’ll be able to finish what I started.

I’ve been unable so far to go back and finish the wide line or to fly over and take photos as-is.

I hope it clears up soon as I’m due to go back to the UK soon.

I had planned to use a high pressure paint sprayer, but due to lack of electricity on the site, I settled for a lawnmower to cut the grass really short followed by a paint roller and a lot of paint.

Here are the results.

The line is about 30cm (1 foot) wide – This shot is of the bottom half of the kiwi.

A close up of a foot.

Unfortunately, the grass was too wet for me to finish the ‘beak’.  Hopefully the weather will start clearing up and I will be able to paint it soon.

This was the plane we hired from North Shore Aero Club.

This was the best photo we managed.

At this point remember that the line was only around 2 inches thick and had been out in heavy rain for a good few weeks.

Either way, the kiwi looked good so I’ll be going up in the near future to thicken the line out a bit.

We marked it out using cans of white spray paint.  The plan is to fly over to make sure it looks ok.  If it does, it will be widened to 1 foot wide.

I ended up buying 4 50m long tapes which made marking out the kiwi a breeze.

We marked out almost all of it with the exception of a few puddles.

Hopefully the weather will clear up soon so I can hire a plane and fly over it.

Nathan helped me mark it out.

Action shot of the spraying – The grass was very wet.

Nathan and AJ standing at the top of the front leg.

I’m not 100% sure if we got this claw/toe on the back foot right or not.  It looks way too long.

Giant Kiwi KMZ file for Google Earth

If you don’t have google earth, here is a screen grab from it.  The satellite photos on Google Earth are still a little out of data and still show the area as a construction site.  It’s now all grass.

The measurements are in metres.  I’ve worked out that the line needs to be about 30cm (1 foot) thick if I want it to be easily visible by satellite.

I’ll try and get a Google Earth KML file created soon

The main requirement was that all arcs had to be centered on an intersection of lines and all straight lines had to start and end at an intersection.  This is so that when marking it out, we have the grid to work to.

The result now is this:

The plan at the moment is that each square in this drawing will end up being 1.25 x 1.25m (Approximately 4 feet by 4 feet).

It appears that I’ll be there for a good few months so I decided I better find some things to keep myself busy. The first idea I came up with was to paint a giant kiwi in the middle of a piece of land I own.

I came across the following picture at http://sneak.co.nz/kiwi/

I’ve just sent the picture off to a friend and hopefully he’ll be able to draw over it with CAD so I can mark it out easily.