After doing more thinking
about dispensing shaving cream, I realized it would be a terrible idea. It would get all over the floor, make a big
mess and be all kinds of slippery.
Having folks wipe out and get hurt is not a good way to get votes for
your costume. So I opted to go with
white silly string, instead, and it was a huge hit/success. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
First up was to take a
picture of what I was trying to create so that I could keep referring back to
it during construction.
Yes; the all-important souce of the good stuff...
Then, a quick trip to Lowe’s for a wardrobe box and I had the main component. It was too big by itself so I had to cut the seams and glue things to make the dimensions more in perspective. Holding things in place for drying took some creativity (what you can’t see are the cardboard supports I’d built to hold the top from collapsing inward.)
Next was the faceplate. I took measurements from the image on my
phone and then used some geometry to scribe the arcs, and voila; a faceplate.
For the window, I tried
taping some cellophane over the middle hole, with some tin foil behind that, but
didn’t like the way it looked…
You could still see the inner
edges of the faceplate’s cutout, so I took the piece of cutout cardboard,
wrapped that in foil and cellophane, then pressed that back into the faceplate
and it looked great; all the edges were in line with each other.
At this point I realized that
since I needed to cut a hole in the top for my head to fit through, I needed to
remove the clothes hanger bar that the wardrobe box comes with. It’s along the top of the box, and secured to
either side with flaps which I’d now painted over. That, and having glued the box into a smaller
shape meant I was no longer able to easily remove the bar without destroying
the box…unless I used my dremel to cut one of the flaps off.
Which I did, nearly setting
the box on fire in the process.
The last thing needed was the
dispensing port. Originally I’d planned
on having it shoot out from the very bottom, but after cutting the hole in the
top for my head, the whole thing sat way too low. The dispensing point needed to be in line
with my unit, so I cut a hole at the right spot and created a rounded half-shell
top to spiff things up a bit.
Success! A life-sized, Purell hand soap
dispenser (I google-image searched on the Purell logo and found some large versions which I printed out and glued on).
And it worked
flawlessly. Well – I did find myself
going through the cans of silly string much faster than planned, but a quick
trip to the party store and I was stocked up again.
A bit of fortune greeted me
in the middle of the day. I happened to
come across the owner of the company (the guy who makes final decisions on who
wins and what place they come in), and he was eating lunch. I proceeded to walk up to him while asking if
he’d washed his hands prior to eating. “It’s
very important to wash your hands – do you need some of me?” and then let loose
with a stream of string, right at the floor in front of him. He started laughing so hard, I honestly
thought he was going to choke on his lunch.
Someone next to me actually said they thought my costume was
inappropriate for Cognex, but the owner (while still laughing his ass off) said
no, it’s PERFECT for Cognex!
Fast forward to the after-work
party, and the contest. I was called up
as one of the finalists and proceeded to spray string all over the dance floor –
much to the laughter and cheers of most people, and got some shocked looks from
others. It turns out I made the company president
blush, but this seemed to please the owner all the more, and I wound up with 6th
place (out of 15). The 5 people who beat
me out, definitely deserved to, as their costumes were very creative and
obviously took much more time and thought than mine had.
I wound up claiming a
KitchenAid blender system of some sort but since I don’t do any kind of serious
baking, I brought it back to Best Buy today at lunch (we’re allowed to do that)
and get store credit; Holy crap - $425!
Not too shabby for 4 nights of work and about $30 of materials.
So there you go; this year’s
costume chaos. I wonder what I’ll wind
up doing next year…
Ride Hard, Take Chances
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