Santa's Workshop

The goal of this project was to build weather-resistant buildings to house animatronic figures during the Christmas display. This was a huge project but in the end, a very enjoyable one that visitors truly enjoyed.

Materials:

• 12, 4x8 sheets of translucent coroplast
• 20, 10' lengths of EMT conduit
• Assorted screws, washers, lockwashers, nuts, wing nuts
• Contact cement, silicone glue, paint, colored duct tape, rolls of self-adhesive vinyl
• Clear plastic sheeting, zip ties, garland, strings of LED lights
• Renzilla controller (or similar lighting controller) set up to control incandescent and LED strings, LED spotlights, servos.

Assembly: There is no "kit" for this kind of project. Much of it is by the seat-of-one's pants along with a healthy dose of by guess and by golly. It started with the creation of a tabletop concept mock-up out of, appropriately, scraps of coroplast. This WIKI page is a summary of the steps; here's a link to the thread in the diychristmas.org forum that contains more running information and commentary than is printed here: SANTA WORKSHOP THREAD

Realizing the size of such a structure might become problematic to erect indoors, the idea morphed into three separate structures with Santa's Workshop being two of the three and the third a self-standing A-frame Elf House. EMT conduit was chosen as the framing material with the thought that it would be more durable, easier to store and afford plenty of strength from the elements. This later proved to be true as the buildings encountered 40-50mph winds soon after setting them outside. We discovered that coroplast sheets zip-tied in multiple places to the EMT frames were incredibly strong and durable. With screws and wing nuts, the EMT frames could be rather quickly dismantled or erected, too. A drawing was made to determine frame trusses and rough angles -- we wanted it to have some character.

We constructed the houses in the basement with not a lot of room to spare. These things were pretty big...

A completed Elf House leans against the wall, including its frame -- they don't take a lot of depth to store but let's face it, 4x8' pieces of coro still take up some space...

Taping the coro panels together for a test-fit of Santa's Workshop gave us a good idea of what it might look like. After the test-fit it was time for paint, cutting windows and doors and the application of self-adhesive vinyl -- all of which was great fun! We wanted it to be colorful and different. The project required almost 4 months to complete.

When it came time to set up the show, we assembled the houses in the garage first. They weren't very heavy -- each was probably about 10-15 pounds or so, and we simply carried them out and pinned the frames to the ground with multiple ground stakes.

Then we put the animatronic figures inside, wired the interior spot lights, applied garland and strings of LEDs to outline everything (and hide the seams), and install the wireless Renzilla controller. We chose the Renzilla because it could control incandescent lights, LED strings, spotlights, and servos for the animatronic figures from a single controller. Today, many other lighting controllers offer similar capabilities, but the design concepts remain the same.

We were pleased with the end result and we know visitors liked it, too!

Although this article documents one specific project, many of the construction techniques—including EMT framing, coroplast panels, and modular assembly—can be adapted to many other outdoor display structures.