How an Ogden company built a colossal star-spangled nutcracker

OGDEN — When a small Minnesota town recently unveiled what is thought to be the world's tallest nutcracker, it had an Ogden-based company to thank for building it.

Towering over the town of Luverne at nearly 66 feet, Verne the Patriot is dressed like Uncle Sam and features a workable mouth that is better suited for crushing watermelons or pumpkins than walnuts. The star-spangled nutcracker was unveiled Saturday in the town, which claims to have more nutcrackers than people.

Verne's home is now in the southwest corner of the Gopher State, but the pieces were designed and built in the fabrication plant of WhiteClouds, which specializes in 3D-printed statues, maps and models. And most of what it makes — like Verne — is larger than life.

"Anything that has the word 'giant' in it ... that's kind of what we build a lot of, and every one of them is usually a first for us," founder and CEO Jerry Ropelato told KSL.

The company, which was founded in 2013, has built statues for "almost every major sports organization in the country," according to Ropelato. Their creations range from massive replicas of snack food items for trade shows to giant lettering for university campuses and everything in between, including a nine-foot statue based on a meme of a poorly drawn sketch of businessman Elon Musk.

Its leaders take pride in their ability to "do anything given the budget and the time."

"We've done a gigantic hand statue of a plastic surgeon's hand holding an LED-lit syringe in front of their building in his shape and form," Jared Page, vice president of marketing, said. "It was an interesting request that came together quite nicely, though."

When he first started the company, Ropelato invested in costly, high-end commercial 3D printers, but now relies on more pedestrian hardware.

"Over time we realized we didn't need the high-end 3D printers," he said. "We've got a printer farm here of about 100 printers, but believe it or not, it's almost identical to what people are using in their homes. The 12-year-old that's got a hobby as a 3D printer, we're using similar printers."

The company figured out how to connect its array of printers to produce large pieces that can be attached to a metal frame to form a large statue.

Verne the Patriot has been about a decade in the making, according to Ropelato, but his company was brought in in recent years to design, build and ship the finished product. They started with an internal metal skeleton and sculpted several pieces of high-density foam like that used in home insulation. The pieces were coated in a protective sealant before being painted.

The colossal nutcracker weighs in at more than 9,000 pounds, not including the base or support tower that were built separately in Minnesota. That includes nearly 5,000 pounds of foam, more than 3,000 pounds of metal, 752 pounds of coating and 255 pounds of paint.

Transporting the statue across the country presented its own set of challenges. The 21 pieces were delivered in six different staged shipments, with the lower parts arriving first, which allowed the statue to be put together piece by piece.

"That's certainly a challenge," Page said of shipping the giant foam pieces. "And as weather affects some of the pieces a little bit — you might see a little bit of expansion due to the different climates. It's always a challenge of trying to figure out how to make 21 separate pieces, six different shipments all come together for an on-site installation of that magnitude and size."

The builders also had to factor in how wind and other environmental factors might impact the structure, which is why they settled on using foam rather than fiberglass, which can become brittle in cold temperatures.

Ropelato was an enthusiastic adopter of artificial intelligence and said the technology helped the team determine how best to break up the structure for transit.

"We had 21 final pieces that shipped," he said. "Should that be 18? Should that be 24? There was a lot of back and forth using AI as almost a brainstorming tool of the best way to fabricate this."

The city of Luverne has submitted the new nutcracker for consideration in the Guinness World Records, hoping to unseat the current record holder for tallest nutcracker, a 33-foot-tall decorative statue in Neuhausen, Germany.

It would be the first time a WhiteClouds project is officially recognized by the Guinness World Records, but it's not the first, or last, time Ropelato and his team have been asked to build something unique. They're already working on building a new giant blue ox to replace the one that stands next to a statue of Paul Bunyan at a famous roadside attraction along U.S. 101 near Klamath, California.

"I would say we get asked the impossible almost every week," the CEO said, "and I would say most of the time we're able to figure out something."

Related topics