It's only natural to ask Lindsay Lawlor why he made a 17-foot-tall talking, walking and glowing robotic giraffe at his Escondido home.

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But don't expect a logical answer. It will be the same as why George Leigh Mallory wanted to climb Mount Everest or why Steve Fossett continues to set aviation records.

Lawlor, 43, made the giraffe to see whether he could. It has no practical purpose, it emptied his savings account, and it consumed his weekends and after-work hours for three years.

"I'm completely tapped out, and I've never had so much fun in my whole life," Lawlor said. "It's just been a project that's rewarding beyond words. It shouldn't even be legal."

His bare, metal-framed creation, resplendent in multicolored lights, twitching glowing ears and 12 speakers that broadcast 500 watts of soothing ambient music, is at once a work of art and mechanical marvel.

Lawlor likes to call it a treehouse.

But back to why he built the giraffe. Lawlor offered another explanation: He created it, he said earnestly, because a robotic zebra would have been redundant.

Of course.

But he has a point. Lawlor likes to wear a zebra suit when he attends the yearly Burning Man festival in Black Rock Desert, Nev., where he first got the idea for a robotic giraffe. He has attended for nine years and has brought the giraffe there for the past two festivals.

Burning Man is an eight-day festival that celebrates self-expression and creativity. Among the many striking sights at the festival are elaborately decorated vehicles called art cars, including some that resemble animals.

Art car concept

Lawlor, who works for a company that makes fire-alarm systems, is not a mechanical engineer and said he had never built anything bigger than a go-cart. But seeing the art cars at Burning Man each year sparked a creative inspiration that soon had him in its grips.

He set out to design his own art car -- he prefers the term "mobile art installation" for his giraffe -- by researching mechanics and working on designs at home for a couple of years. A zebra riding a zebra would be just too much, he reasoned, and somebody at Burning Man already had a mechanical horse. But a giraffe, he thought, would be unique and would give him an elevated view of the miles of flat land that Burning Man spans.

Blueprints for the original concept showed a Trojan horselike vehicle, with a stiff-legged giraffe standing atop a rolling vehicle. He showed the drawings to his friend Gary Stadler, who had another idea.

"Everybody else who makes art vehicles makes them on car frames," Lawlor recalled him saying. "If you make one that actually walks, nobody will have that."

To make his argument even more convincing, Stadler pointed out that Lawlor already had a design to follow in a tiny plastic battery-powered giraffe toy made by Tamiya. Lawlor grudgingly agreed his friend was right, then threw out the plans he had worked on for two years. And then the real work began.

"It was 10 months of solid welding, every day after work," he said.

Then, a giraffe

Re-creating the toy giraffe at a 24-to-1 scale, Lawlor took no chances with his creation's durability when welding together its legs, neck, torso and many cross-supports. An engineer who later inspected his work said the sheer strength at its shoulders, or the pressure it would take to break, is 50,000 pounds. The giraffe itself weighs about 2,000 pounds.

Hydraulics control the giraffe's head, which extends to 17 feet off the ground. The robot's feet are four inflated tires that serve mostly as cushioning as its stiff, knee-less legs walk, although they do roll to make it easier for Lawlor to load it into a trailer.

"When he's walking, he's quite lifelike, despite being robotic," Lawlor said. "We get a lot of people treating him like a real animal."

The robotic is powered by $550 in batteries. To keep them charged when out in the desert during Burning Man, Lawlor installed a propane-powered generator.

After watching many an art car stall out in the harsh conditions of the desert, Lawlor kept the mechanics simple. The engine is directly connected to the battery and spins at one speed and in one direction. Because of its efficient design, the robot needs only one horsepower to walk.

"It basically cannot fail," he said. "All you do is move a small little lever."

Lawlor steers from the giraffe's back in a cockpit that can seat four adults or eight children.

"But he's not at all done," he said. "It's still a project very, very much in transition."

'That tickles'

His most recent improvement to the giraffe's head was to make its ears move. The giraffe also has a voice that is triggered when electronic sensors on its face are stroked.

"Ha-ha-ha, that tickles," the giraffe says when its ears are touched. "Oooh, I like that," it says when its nose is scratched.

Lawlor said he is particularly proud that people who work with giraffes have told him he did a good job of designing its head. Lawlor said he just worked from memory on what he thought the head should look like.

He hopes someday to take the giraffe to trade shows, and most recently exhibited it at the Bay Area Maker Faire in May, where a crew from the Discovery Channel noticed it and made plans to come to Escondido this month to interview him.

As yet, Lawlor said, he still has not been paid to show the giraffe anywhere, and he has mixed feelings about trying to cash in on a project that he sees as pure art. Besides, he said, he already has received plenty of intangible rewards.

"I don't have any children of my own, but when I go to an event, all the children are mine," he said.

Children also are more intuitive about just what the creation is when they see it on Lawlor's trailer.

"When I'm at a gas station, adults ask what it is," Lawlor said. "They all think it's some kind of combine harvesting equipment. But all the kids know right away and say, 'That's a toy!'"

To learn more about Lindsay Lawlor and his giraffe, visit his Web site, http://electricgiraffe.com.

Contact staff writer Gary Warth at (760) 740-5410 or gwarth@nctimes.com.

- The giraffe is named Russell,

after the computer program that

designed its voice.

- It's 17 feet tall and 2,000 pounds.

- The giraffe's top speed is one-half mile an hour.

- It has been to the Burning Man festival in Black Rock Desert, Nev., twice.