Woodshop Horse as ordered by Tradestrong

Tradestrong Orders Giant Rocking Horse for Christmas Parade

By Odin Burleson

December 20th, 2024

Around last month, Tradestrong, a local business, ordered a large rocking-horse. The horse was  displayed at the auburn Christmas display a few weeks ago during their parade.

One of the horses main purpose was to serve as decoration for a parade float during the Auburn Christmas Parade. However, the horse wasn't just built to serve as a prop for the parade, as Tradestorm also used it to help kids in the ag workshop class get practice.

Woodshop teacher Cody Walker said that multiple students from different class periods had gotten an opportunity to work on the horse.

“It's a rocking horse, it can hold people up, and they had a good time building it,” Walker said.

The second main purpose was to help out students in AG woodshop by giving them a project to work on, and is also helping them find a career in construction with the help on Tradestrong

“They can help me find a job opportunity in construction and help supply stuff for construction stuff like tools,” Senior Lucas Hancock said.

Tradetrong is a Non-Profit organization that helps students in the Lincoln region to get a job / skills for construction roles after high school. Currently, Walker is using Tradestrong to help out students to get into trade for jobs after highschool.

“The Horse is with tradestrong who actually ordered the materials, tradestrongs purpose is to get students into trade,” Walker said.

Tradestrong also ordered a few other projects/cutouts to be built in the woodshop, like the Santa train for the students in the workshop to work on and construct. Currently, the horse has been relocated to a Tradestrong warehouse, after it was used for the parade.

“Yeah I'm building stuff like that, like the train we built for them also then the shed we were working on also,” Hancock said.

The Biggest Problem to overcome for the workshop was trying to find the correct dimensions and making it fit, and also trying to cut the pieces to be even on both sides of the horse, as they did not have blueprints.

“Biggest obstacle was coming up with a design, we didn't have blueprints,” Walker said