Gimli's Viking gets facelift after a half century standing guard

Gimli's Viking has been caged up in orange tarps this week while it undergoes a facelift 48 years in the making.

Alberta's Dinosaur Valley Studios is the company in charge of getting the Viking back in tip-top shape.

The statue,unveiled in 1967,was constructed by George Barone, a former CBC set designer, who wasalsoresponsible for the White Horse Plain statue andBoissevain's turtle.

In the time since the Viking's birth, it has weathered quite a bit, according to Dinosaur Valley Studios' President Frank Hadfield.

"Right now we've done the first stage, which is to get through [48] years of grime and grit and lichens and mould and we're cleaning that surface up so we can see all of the damageand the original colour that it had. So we can move on to the second phase, which will be the repair of the gel coat andfiberglassstructure," Hadfield said.

Hadfield and three of his colleagues will beconsolidatingthe surface of the statue,repairing the cracks, then patching theViking's gel coat, before it is then cured and ready to be unveiled to the public.

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Hadfield said one of their challenges will be to match the statues original colour, anoff-white cream colour, while they're working away under an orange tarp that discolours everything underneath.Hadfield said at some point they will have to give up their controlled environment and takethe tarp off for thecolouring process.

"Don't worry about that, we won't give him any sort of fake-and-bake tan or anything," Hadfieldjoked with CBC'sRadio Noonhost Janet Stewart.

Initially, the company had planned tomove the statue to their studio in Alberta but some roadblocks meant they had to come up with a plan B.

"We couldn't find anyone who actually knew how it was actually anchored to the ground," Hadfield said.

And so, for the statue'ssafety, plans changed and now itstands under and orange canopy.

Hadfield said they haveallotted two weeks for the repair and they think they will be done ahead of schedulebut there could always be setbacks.