Post #721056 by ToddVegas on Thu, Jun 26, 2014 2:23 PM

On 2014-06-26 13:41, LoriLovesTiki wrote:
Very cool! Would you care to share how you created the tikis, moai and palm trees? Being from NJ I'm always looking for ways to make things for my yard that would survive our winters. Being from Michigan I'm sure you understand that!

Well, the current tiki lights were purchased (and we painted them with UV reactive paint so they would glow under black lights). We are currently working on making our own tiki too!

The moai is carved out of foam:

1. Since there isn't anywhere locally to get a large enough block of foam, we went to the home improvement store, and purchased sheets of rigid insulation foam (must be EPS or bead-board foam).

2. We cut the 4x8 foam sheets into 4x4

[After this point, we used several items from Hot Wire Foam Factory, which I will abbreviate as "HWFF"]

3. Using special glue from HWFF, we glued a bunch of the 4x4 foam sheets together to create a large block of foam.

4. We sanded the glued foam until it was relatively smooth.

** I forgot a step... We used a projector to project a moai picture onto the foam, and traced the image onto the foam with a marker, to get a starting point for the carving **

5. We used a combination of saws, knives, and a hot wire kit (from HWFF) to carve the foam.

6. HWFF has different foam coatings you can use to harden and protect your foam carvings. We used Exterior Foam Coat (with Boost) and Grit (to make it look like stone).

7. We painted it grey with exterior latex paint

8. We painted it with a LOT of ClearNeon invisible black light paint (to make it glow).

Now the palm/bamboo trees were much more involved, so maybe I'll post a tutorial with pics on how we made those.

[ Edited by: ToddVegas 2014-06-26 14:27 ]