Skeleton Posts
PROJECT INSANITY ALBUM
PITA Quotient: Moderate
Planned Project: Yes
We'd bought a coupla sets of this fencing for Halloween 2007, and as viewed in this photo, placed them outside along the walkway to the front door.
But in 2007, however, they went completely limp in the heat of the sun :::insert naughty mental imagery here::: Imagine the skull heads on these bowing down 2/3 of the way to the walkway. Argh! Turned out that the plastic just couldn't hold up under its own weight once the heat from the sun softened it. It wasn't even particularly hot . . . perhaps mid to high 70s. Even after cooling, they no longer wanted to remain upright, so I inspected their construction to see what, if anything, could be improved, and decided this could be fixed easily in 2008.
Famous last words! Well, it wasn't difficult, but as with everything else in October of 2008, it entailed considerably more work than I'd anticipated.
Everything connects together with +/- 5-inch-long interior lengths of a more rigid plastic. Unfortunately, that rigid plastic is connected to the much softer plastic of the bones and skull, and the softer plastic is what was going limp. Still, no problem. All of the bones are totally hollow, so all I needed to do was saw off the rigid plastic and replace them with a roughly one-yard length of broomstick or some such. Easy-peasy, no?
Yeah, well. Although the rigid plastic came right off with the Dremel, I still needed to sort of router out the areas where they connected in order for a broomstick to fit through the resulting holes. No problem; just tedious . . . and messy, LOL! I wound up covered with fine black plastic after performing said surgery upon each piece! I'd anticipated the mess landing all over the place and preemptively covered the floor first . . . but other than wearing eye protection, neglected to take my arms, legs, and feet into account. Live and learn!
Then there were the broomsticks. We'd bought several El Cheapo brooms at the dollar store. The handles appeared to be covered with plastic that I thought would end up peeling off. When I started sawing through them with the Dremel, the cutter went through that part quite easily, but when it made contact with the underneath, suddenly I started seeing sparks. Uhm. What?! Surely, I was imagining things. Made a second attempt. Nope, still sparks. Okie-dokie. The interiors weren't made of wood after all, but metal. *Sigh!* Back to the drawing board. After inspecting more brooms elsewhere, they all seemed to have a similar construction. Finally, I resorted to wooden paint roller extension attachments that fit the bill quite nicely, but it took a week or two of extra time going back and forth trying to find a workable substitute. Who knew brooms would be so freakin' problematic?
Of course, then I didn't want to be seeing raw wood between the joints of the bones, so I did a quick-and-dirty touch-up in those four spots on each stick with a fat, black, permanent marker. That was probably one of the easiest parts of this project, but still took an hour or two.
Another problematic bit was that the original bottom-most bone attached to the base with a screw-on cap from underneath. The wood substitution I'd made wasn't quite the same diameter, and it wobbled inside the base enough that it looked like The Leaning Tower of Bones. I knew that was going to be a problem when I had the original faux broomsticks, and spent considerable time roaming hardware stores trying to find either metal or plastic pipe end caps that would fit. Eh, no such luck . . . the sizing was either just a smidge too small or a smidge too large. In the end, I wound up wrapping a 5-inch-square piece of black, rubber shelf liner around the bottom of the wood, jamming it into the base piece, and beating the heck outta the top of the wood with a rubber mallet until the wood/liner combo was flush with the base at the floor. Voila; no more wobble nor leaning tower. I cut off any remaining bits of liner at the top of the base with a craft knife.
Up on the other end, there was a minor problem with the skulls. I'd made sure to cut the wood long enough that it went all the way to the top of the skulls on the interior. Still, the skulls wanted to sort of slide around on the cut end of the wood inside, giving them a cockeyed appearance. I removed the skulls and covered the top of the wood with an uninflated balloon, thinking they just needed some sort of nonskid, stopper-type gizmo to keep them from sliding around. That helped, but needed more oomph, so I removed the balloons, positioned a coupla cotton balls right on top of the wood, then replaced the balloons on top of the cotton balls. Bingo!
The acid test was placing them back on the walkway in the heat of the sun, aaaaaaaaand . . . :::crossing fingers::: . . . it all worked wonderfully well. Noooooooo unsightly sagging this year. This was probably the most satisfying of all of this year's projects.
Skeleton Posts
PROJECT INSANITY ALBUM
PITA Quotient: Moderate
Planned Project: Yes
We'd bought a coupla sets of this fencing for Halloween 2007, and as viewed in this photo, placed them outside along the walkway to the front door.
But in 2007, however, they went completely limp in the heat of the sun :::insert naughty mental imagery here::: Imagine the skull heads on these bowing down 2/3 of the way to the walkway. Argh! Turned out that the plastic just couldn't hold up under its own weight once the heat from the sun softened it. It wasn't even particularly hot . . . perhaps mid to high 70s. Even after cooling, they no longer wanted to remain upright, so I inspected their construction to see what, if anything, could be improved, and decided this could be fixed easily in 2008.
Famous last words! Well, it wasn't difficult, but as with everything else in October of 2008, it entailed considerably more work than I'd anticipated.
Everything connects together with +/- 5-inch-long interior lengths of a more rigid plastic. Unfortunately, that rigid plastic is connected to the much softer plastic of the bones and skull, and the softer plastic is what was going limp. Still, no problem. All of the bones are totally hollow, so all I needed to do was saw off the rigid plastic and replace them with a roughly one-yard length of broomstick or some such. Easy-peasy, no?
Yeah, well. Although the rigid plastic came right off with the Dremel, I still needed to sort of router out the areas where they connected in order for a broomstick to fit through the resulting holes. No problem; just tedious . . . and messy, LOL! I wound up covered with fine black plastic after performing said surgery upon each piece! I'd anticipated the mess landing all over the place and preemptively covered the floor first . . . but other than wearing eye protection, neglected to take my arms, legs, and feet into account. Live and learn!
Then there were the broomsticks. We'd bought several El Cheapo brooms at the dollar store. The handles appeared to be covered with plastic that I thought would end up peeling off. When I started sawing through them with the Dremel, the cutter went through that part quite easily, but when it made contact with the underneath, suddenly I started seeing sparks. Uhm. What?! Surely, I was imagining things. Made a second attempt. Nope, still sparks. Okie-dokie. The interiors weren't made of wood after all, but metal. *Sigh!* Back to the drawing board. After inspecting more brooms elsewhere, they all seemed to have a similar construction. Finally, I resorted to wooden paint roller extension attachments that fit the bill quite nicely, but it took a week or two of extra time going back and forth trying to find a workable substitute. Who knew brooms would be so freakin' problematic?
Of course, then I didn't want to be seeing raw wood between the joints of the bones, so I did a quick-and-dirty touch-up in those four spots on each stick with a fat, black, permanent marker. That was probably one of the easiest parts of this project, but still took an hour or two.
Another problematic bit was that the original bottom-most bone attached to the base with a screw-on cap from underneath. The wood substitution I'd made wasn't quite the same diameter, and it wobbled inside the base enough that it looked like The Leaning Tower of Bones. I knew that was going to be a problem when I had the original faux broomsticks, and spent considerable time roaming hardware stores trying to find either metal or plastic pipe end caps that would fit. Eh, no such luck . . . the sizing was either just a smidge too small or a smidge too large. In the end, I wound up wrapping a 5-inch-square piece of black, rubber shelf liner around the bottom of the wood, jamming it into the base piece, and beating the heck outta the top of the wood with a rubber mallet until the wood/liner combo was flush with the base at the floor. Voila; no more wobble nor leaning tower. I cut off any remaining bits of liner at the top of the base with a craft knife.
Up on the other end, there was a minor problem with the skulls. I'd made sure to cut the wood long enough that it went all the way to the top of the skulls on the interior. Still, the skulls wanted to sort of slide around on the cut end of the wood inside, giving them a cockeyed appearance. I removed the skulls and covered the top of the wood with an uninflated balloon, thinking they just needed some sort of nonskid, stopper-type gizmo to keep them from sliding around. That helped, but needed more oomph, so I removed the balloons, positioned a coupla cotton balls right on top of the wood, then replaced the balloons on top of the cotton balls. Bingo!
The acid test was placing them back on the walkway in the heat of the sun, aaaaaaaaand . . . :::crossing fingers::: . . . it all worked wonderfully well. Noooooooo unsightly sagging this year. This was probably the most satisfying of all of this year's projects.