Pillar Project Phase 4

Almost done with the cemetery fence. I spent today shortening my old fence sections to match the new pillars. I thought it would take much longer than it did. I'm glad Jared mentioned the unscrew, move, rescrew, and cut method, otherwise I would have hacked out a foot from the middle of the posts and that wouldn't have worked too well.

Once I got the fence sections cut down I went about setting up the fence in the yard. Pictures are here. Tomorrow I'll go about lighting them and covering them with webbing.

I discovered that my pillars are a bit wobbly and very light-weight so they will probably blow over with a stiff wind. I'll have to devise some way to hold them in place. I hope they hold up in the weather until next Saturday.

Pillar project phase 3

Over the last few days I finished painting the pillars and attached the skull toppers. Pictures are here. I had to sand and cut down the foam before painting them. I used gray latex primer, 2 coats, and once that dried I use black acrylic spray paint to give them a weathered look. It didn't turn out quite as well as I'd hoped. I should have used black primer and then dry-brushed gray over top.

The skulls gave me a bit a of a problem. I decided not to put the lights inside the pillars. Instead I'll have the lights attached on the outside and through the back of the skulls. I cut holes in the skulls and then attached them to the tops of the pillars with hot glue. I had to pick the "best" side of each pillar for the front and top. They were all a bit lop-sided and uneven. Today I might chop off a few inches of my fence sections and then set it all up in the yard.

Pillar project, phase 2

The next phase of the pillars is finished, cutting and gluing the foam insulation around the frames. I've put more pictures up here.

I severely under estimated the amount of glue it would take to get everything mounted. I ended up using 7 tubes of foamboard project glue. I preferred the stuff I found at Home Depot over the Liquid Nails I picked up at Jerry's. It's called "PL300 Foamboard Adhesive" and comes in a blue labeled tube. The glue is light blue when it comes out. It had a more tacky consistency which helped keep the foam attached to the PVC.

I had to keep weight on the pillars while the glue dried. I came up with a way of distributing the weight across all 5 pillars at the same time by using some boards I had laying around in the garage. This meant I could do 5 sides at a time. It took about 8 hours for a side to completely dry so after about 2 days I had all of the sides done.

After the sides were done I cut small 1 foot by 3 inch strips of foam to surround the tops and bottoms of the pillars, giving them some weight and depth. This process used a bunch of glue. The strips stuck much more readily to other foam and plywood than to the PVC pipes so I didn't have to weight them down before doing the next strip. As I did this it became painfully obvious that my plywood "squares" were far from square and that the PVC frame had not been centered correctly on them. I will have some very irregularly shaped pillars. Maybe it will increase their charm.

I used a coarse sandpaper to shave down any corners of the foam where the sides joined and to smooth out the beady nature of the foam. Cutting the foam with a utility knife left many jagged edges and my garage floor was covered in foam shrapnel by the end of the process.

Tomorrow after all the glue has dried I will start painting them.