October 21, 2005

Yesterday I spent most of the day working on making sure that the pizza sauce barrel prop would survive a couple of weeks worth of punishment and trying out a lid that I designed. 

For the most part things went smoothly.  I ended up making the lid out of extruded foam because it was very light and a lot stronger than other materials I had on hand.  It was pretty easy to attach the lid to the head of the prop, but in my opinion it looked really dumb (like a seriously exaggerated hat).  I also had doubts about it holding up for several thousand activations, so I tried making a hinged lid design.  That was quite entertaining... When all was said and done, the working hinged version - while a lot cooler looking - was just as weak as the other version and I seriously doubted that it would hold up in the long run.

Today I spent as much time trying to make some arms and hands that looked right with the prop.  Unfortunately, no matter how hard I tried, the arms just kept getting caught up on the barrel rim or kept the prop from returning back to neutral correctly.  After 3-4 hours of trial and error and a lot of complicated parts, I decided to scrap the idea all together.  The arms and hands did not add much to the prop, but they did add potential problems.

The last major change was to cut the pop-up down about 2 inches so that it was farther down in the barrel.  With the lid out of the picture, I wanted to make the pop-up a little lower in the barrel so that it couldn't be seen as easily.  That sacrifices 2 inches of height on the pop-up,

I thought that I'd take a picture of the lid since I worked so long trying to make it work.  It will not be part of the final design that gets delivered to the pizza place though.  There's just too many things that can go wrong with the lid and I don't want Deb and Kirby to have to mess with it at all during the couple of weeks it will be that their business.
Well, here's the final result.  It isn't exactly how I had envisioned it, but I think it will work very reliably and still get the job done. If everything is set on at the pizza place I'll probably deliver the prop to them tomorrow and do some additional decorating so that the prop is not the only thing in the room...	(click on image for video)

That's basically it for this prop.  I will be using the air that escapes from the bypass valve to add sound and since this prop will be in a well lit room, there's no need for any lighting...  I need to pick up a couple of connectors and some hose for the noise maker tomorrow.  Then the final tuning will be done on-site (hopefully).