I built a last minute halloween project this year, and it has one interesting use of dollar store stuff I thought was worth sharing. Here’s the finished build:
Most of what you see there is three layers of precision engineered organic carbon fibre composite structural material, custom shaped by lasers.
AKA laser-cut cardboard.
But what’s going on in the middle, you ask?
A dollar store replacement pot lid handle, screwed through an old cap. Worked perfectly and held up all night, although the picture doesn’t include the layers of tape I put over that screw to avoid an extra hole being slowly drilled into the top of my head.
One more picture for scale:
That’s about 64cm side-to-side, and I wouldn’t want to make it any bigger.
If I were to do it again I would probably cut a bunch of big circles in the middle layer to reduce weight, and maybe consider a small section of 3mm birch ply around the pot handle for the middle layer just to ensure it doesn’t get ripped out somehow. You do have to stagger your hole sizes in the centre to make the pot handle fit - I think I used 40mm, 25mm, 30mm from top to bottom, and then I hand crushed the edges of the lower layer to fit the taper of the wide flare of the handle. If you have access to larger unfolded pieces of cardboard, two layers would probably be enough, although three allowed me to make the centre layer a little larger to give the edges a rounded effect. And a few small holes cut through the stack would help make alignment easier when gluing - put something like toothpicks or pencils through the layers to line them all up.