19: Mario Coins

When walking around this great city, one thing often strikes me as a serious problem. There is a severe lack of giant Marioesque coins floating above the sidewalks.

This week, I did my part to remedy that problem.

I can taste that 1-up already. (Build photos and close-ups after the jump.)

Alright, so you start with some corrugated plastic, because it’s cheap, and because you can’t find any Plexiglas, which is what you really want.

Then you cut out some coin shapes and a stencil template using a close-up of a coin from screenshot you took from Super Mario Brothers. I’m not talking SMB2 or 3 here; I’m looking for some serious pixelation and limited colors.

Alright, then you give them a light dusting of spray paint so you don’t have to mark out the pattern 8 times.

Then, it’s paint by number. (It probably would have been easier to just stencil spray the colors, but I already had brush paint in my colors, and I didn’t want to make a store run for more spray paint.) If you marked them out in 1 inch pixels, a 1 inch foam brush is a really good idea.

My fingers still hurt from making these hooks. Not pictured here is where I coated them in rubbery hot glue to minimize sliding around.

Check out my high-tech deployment method.

They’re ready for placement, and boy do they look good.

Close-up of the engineering end. A former coworker used to say, “If you can’t tie a knot, tie a lot,” and let me assure you that is what is under the tape–a lot of knots.

I ended up looking up some knot tying instructions for this end. Pay no attention to the bird piñata.

That’s me with the Frankenpole® at 5:30 in the morning. It was stitched together out of 3 other poles and reanimated in a lab. It’s like 16 feet up to that wire!

Sorry for the picture quality here. I may go get another soon.

**UPDATE** Despite my anti-slip measures, the wind has pushed them closer together, and now they’re all tangled and ugly. I will probably try to retrieve them tonight and redeploy. Stay tuned.

**ANOTHER UPDATE** I was able to get the coins back down with the aide of a Frankenpole® attachment. Putting them back up was not as smooth as last time, but we figured out a way to tape them in place, using yet another high-tech attachment.

This time, I brushed the dust off the wire, put them all up with tape loosely attached, switched over to the Tape Presser again, and pressed down the tape to to the newly clean wire.

I love duct tape. They’re not moving, so it looks like it worked.