monkey-mattproject-blog

[monkey-mattproject-blog]

Project Blog: Holiday Monkey

Ever since I decided a couple years ago to get more serious about Making stuff, I’ve meant to keep some kind of project journal. This is partly for myself, to try and cement what I’ve learned, since I’m doing lots of things just once. It’s also for friends who ask enough polite questions that I believe they’re actually interested in a project, so I can give them a link with details. Finally, it’s a thank you to the internet, which is an indispensable archive of tips and tricks* for the modern DIY/maker/enthusiast/whatever you call yourself. Maybe somebody will stumble across one of these and find it useful for their own crazy project someday.

(* The internet is, of course, also a deep, deep well of confusion and lies -- but with a little patience, it’s still worth digging through for the tips and tricks.)

I haven’t quite figured out the best format for these. I’m starting out by posting about some already-done projects, which means they’ll just be one huge post. I hope in the future to actually post as I go, like a real blogger person.

The Project

For my inaugural blog, I picked a relatively simple project, a life-size holiday ornament monkey my wife wanted for Christmas this year:

We were inspired by the nearby Phinney Neighborhood Association holiday monkeys, which they’ve been doing for the last few years.

I started with a photo my wife sent me of a monkey pendant. I traced the edges in Photoshop to make a template and printed it out. I knew I wanted an ornament that would hang in our front window, which meant it should be around 18″ wide. I thought I would end up bending something along a template (somehow), so I needed to enlarge my printout by a factor of 2-3. Which brings us to...

Puzzle One

I don’t have transparency paper, I don’t have a projector, and I don’t have the patience to procure either one. How do I enlarge a drawing? Eventually, wandering around my basement, I came up with a scheme. I’m not recommending this to anyone, it’s just what I was able to invent with the materials at hand. (I wish I had taken a picture of this -- sorry, I’m new.) I traced the design in Sharpie on a plastic picture cover (from an old framed thing I didn’t want), which I suspended it over a piece of foam core board (on two lightweight filing cabinets). I used a tripod and a swivel arm (left over from the days when I thought I was a filmmaker) to suspend my iPhone over the transparency. Its flashlight was a little weak, but it was the best light for projecting an image (either you need a lens, like a proper projector, or you need a point source, otherwise you can’t focus). Then I traced the image on the foam core. Simple! A giant monkey, in more or less the shape of the pendant I started with.

Puzzle Two

What do I actually make the frame out of? This was the puzzle that preoccupied me the most while I was working on this. It needed to be something to which I could affix the lighting strip easily. It also needed to be light, but hold its shape well. From the start I thought some kind of metal would work best. But if it’s too thin, it would be all wobbly and fragile, and too thick -- too hard to shape. In the end, I wound up at Metal Supermarkets (those guys are awesome), and got the thing they had that most closely fit the bill -- four six-foot lengths of 1/2″ wide, 1/8″ thick aluminum bar. It’s light, it’s pretty, it’s strong.

I had some vague notions of building a bending rig, or maybe using a pipe bender, but after a little playing around, decided I could just bend it by hand. BARELY. I felt like Superman! You ever need a good forearm workout, buy some of this stuff and bend it into a really wiggly shape. Like a monkey.

It was so hard to bend that I had to just eyeball the template, making measurements where I could. (Again, amateurishly, I failed to take a picture of the template. Just imagine it looks kind of like a monkey.)

You can tell from this picture that by just kind of diving into this headlong, I swam right into...

Puzzle Three

Yeah, so, it turns out that eyeballing the perimeter of a convoluted shape is not easy. I underestimated how much bar length I needed by just about a factor of two (what you see in the picture above is a single six-foot piece). Fortunately, I had several spare pieces, and both the means and the will to drill holes in things! Here’s the answer:

Coasting Downhill (Eeeeasy Monkey.)

Making the tail was actually really fun and easy, though it took a fair bit of tweaking to get the width more or less uniform along the length. Here it is prepped for drilling:

I cut down the piece ends with a hacksaw, sanded them with 80# sandpaper (to keep them from cutting anyone or gouging the electronics), and bolted them together. Piece of cake. (Which is good, because at this point it’s like December 23rd, and remember this is a Christmas present...)

I haven’t mentioned the lights themselves because it was a complete no-brainer. I bought this guy from Amazon for $20, cut it to length and taped it in. (My only nit with this product was that the adhesive backing was not very sticky -- I ended up adding 3 or 4 clear plastic zip-ties to hold it on better.)

The strip comes with an IR remote, so we can tune the monkey color to our mood from across the room. Sweet.

Final Thoughts

If I had to make another one, I might search for slightly thinner bar stock, or maybe have somebody cut me strips out of 1/16″ sheet metal, so it’s easier to bend -- I think it would still be strong enough. Overall though, this was a reasonably painless project, didn’t cost a crazy amount of money or time, and turned out decently well. Huzzah! (And a belated happy holidays.)