Last year’s entry in Los Alamos’s downtown scarecrow contest was a big hit, so I decided to do it again this year. Only this year I wanted it to be bigger and better. The theme for 2021 is “Out of this World”, which opens a lot of possibilities, but I reached back long ago to a galaxy far, far away for inspiration: a giant six-foot diameter Death Star.
Planning
The first challenge was to figure out how to make a sphere that was six feet in diameter, could be transported downtown, could be set up by one or two people, and could survive Los Alamos’s sometimes-crazy October weather.
The general plan I came up with was to cover a frame of PVC pipes in fabric, which would be lightweight and easy to handle. Building it in quarters would make it transportable in the back of the van. And since the scarecrow contest assigns streetlight poles for scarecrows to hang on, I could build around a pole and have a solid core to anchor to.
A little streetlight pole recon gave me the confidence it would work and gave me the dimensions I needed to get started. The poles each have a rectangular base that holds their wiring, and a standard cylindrical pole with the light on top. Some of them have signs attached to them, which I knew would interfere with the design I had in mind, so I made note that I needed to avoid those ones. I measured the box and the diameter of the pole itself, and with that I had enough info to get started.
Construction
Bending the PVC pipes was really easy with a heat gun. I built a jig to make them all have a consistent three-foot radius, cut them down to size, and got to bending! Once they were bent, I built some small brackets out of 2x4 scraps that would hold the pipes together at the north and south poles. These needed to be arch-shaped so they could eventually wrap around one of the light poles I measured earlier.
I built the full frame in quarters so I could easily disassemble it to take it downtown. Each quarter had a central 2x4 support member that kept it solid, and I also used those to mount the segments to the light pole with a couple of ratchet straps wrapped around the central core. That way no light poles were harmed in the creation of this scarecrow.
After some tailoring to attach the fabric skins, I was ready to decorate them! I was too lazy to draw individual death star details on each segment with a sharpie, so I just used masking tape to make some authentic-looking designs and I got ready to paint.
Rattle-can black on top of the light-gray cloth worked perfectly. I purposely left the paint light and mottled, and used heavier north/south strokes to get more texture and detail. I was building this to be viewed from a distance, so broad suggestion was more important than fine detail.
Finally it was time to put it up! I wanted to use the light pole we were assigned as the core of the structure, but I didn’t want it to be structurally necessary. It would be pretty embarrassing to have the county call us up and tell us we had knocked over a light pole. So, I built a frame that fit around the bottom of the pole and supported all of the death star’s weight. It went up in quadrants, and I used ratcheting straps on the inside to hold the four pieces to the pole. We had to leave a trap door in the bottom of the fabric of the last piece so we could climb in and ratchet it down, and that was easy to stitch up after it was up.
And that’s another successful scarecrow! It got a lot of attention while we were putting it up, including somebody who rolled down their window and called out “These are not the droids you’re looking for!” as they drove past. Lis, of course, replied with “That’s no scarecrow!”. It was great fun.