Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share (19 page)

Building the balloon column is truly a partnering activity. One person should be inflating and initially tying each balloon while the other is assembling the column. The work flow should be as fo llows:

How many balloons you’ll need will depend on the size of the balloons you get in your party kit. Usually they’ll inflate to a pear shape about 10 inches across, and 14 inches long. Once you have sixteen of these, in four quads, tied onto your ribbon, you can test the lifting capacity by running the ribbon through the wrist strap of your camera (which is the heaviest part of your build) and seeing if the camera lifts off. Keep in mind that you want it to lift pretty sharply—we don’t want neutral buoyancy here, we want to have a pretty strong lift. So if the balloons lift the camera, but weakly, add another quad of balloons to be sure.

When you have your balloons done, cut the ribbon about 18 inches below the bottom quad of balloons, and use all your Boy Scout or Wikipedia know-how to tie a knot in the end that creates a nonslipping loop. Pass the ends of the zip ties on the top of your camera cockpit through this loop, then zip them together so the balloons are securely attached to the package. Play with the zip ties so that, when the balloons pull upward, the package is oriented as straightly vertically as possible, for better filming.

Get your kite string and tie the same nonslip loop knot in the end of it. Do the same thing with the zip ties at the bottom of your package to secure the line.

Start the countdown! Now you can head out to a nearby field, park, or other open area where you can get some clearance around you, just in case. Take your camera (fresh batteries, cleared memory, please!) and the roll of duct tape with you.

When you’re ready, one person should hold the balloons while the other starts the camera recording, sets it into the cockpit (lens facing outward!), and tapes it with a pass or two of duct tape.

Launch your craft, and let the balloons take it away. On a windless day, you should be able to get the camera up to near the end of your kite string and get some really neat footage. Then, just like pulling in a kite, rewind your tether to bring the craft back to Earth. Go home, hook your camera up to your big-screen TV, and get a feel for what it’s like to be a bird (and find out which of your neighbors needs to clean their pool)!

W
hen I was a kid, I remember building a homemade Slip ʹN Slide with my friends to have some outdoor fun on a hot summer day. We’d usually cut up a number of black garbage bags and try to overlap them to create a good run. Then turn a sprinkler or two on them, and get busy.

These days, mass-produced Slip ’N Slide-type things are available at any big-box store for around $30. They’re big, bright, and even imaginative. Heck, you can drop a couple hundred bucks and get giant inflatable water slides that will fill up your whole yard.

What I’ve found over a few years with my kids and their friends is that the quality of construction usually makes these slides a one-or two-use product. And while I said they were imaginative, they’re usually not that big, since they’re designed for a mass market of people who won’t all have the yard space for a larger slide. So I started to wonder if there wasn’t something that could be done at home, in the DIY spirit of using garbage bags like I did as a kid, but a bit more durable and, you know, BIGGER. And what I came up with is easy to build, hugely fun to play with, durable, and simple to take apart and store for significant reuse.

This project may have the claim to fame of being the largest-scale but easiest-to-build in the book. We’re putting together the basic concept of the Slip ’N Slide (SNS) using durable over-the-counter materials. All you need is a $30 roll of heavy plastic, ten $2 pool noodles, a $10 sprinkler hose, and a couple rolls of peel-and-stick Velcro (about $7 a roll).

So what is an SNS at its core? It’s simply a long expanse of material that gets slippery when wet. It should have some kind of guides or berms on the sides to keep sliders from slipping off while traveling down its length. And it needs a water source.

1. To start, take your roll of heavy sheet plastic and lay it out on your yard or other assembly site. We tried some 6-milliliter plastic, 6 feet wide by 50 feet long for our sample slide, since it gave a nice width of sliding surface, and the length fit across our front yard. But, depending on your location, you may want a smaller or bigger (yeah!) slide. Figure out which side is the top (it’s a completely arbitrary decision since both sides are the same, but you have to pick one and stick with it), and place it facedown.

2. Lay the noodles around the perimeter of your plastic. You can leave a foot or so between each noodle. The standard length of a pool noodle is about 5 feet, so for our 50-foot long slide, we used eight noodles per side with about a foot of spacing, give or take, and then one noodle at either end.

3. Next, starting at one end, take a noodle and lay it on the plastic a few inches in from the outside edge. Pull the plastic over the noodle as if you’re going to wrap it up, and get enough overlap so about an inch of the plastic from the edge touches the plastic on the other side of the noodle toward the middle. This is where you’ll be sticking the Velcro.

4. Attach a 2-inch strip of the Velcro to the plastic at each end and in the middle of each noodle so that the plastic wraps over and under the noodle and is attached back to itself. Do this for all the noodles until you have a berm all the way around the perimeter of your slide.

5. Once you’re done, you have the underside of your slide. Flip it over, and you should have what looks a little like a very long, very narrow emergency slide from an airliner. Or a really cool waterslide.

6. Last thing we need is the water source. If you’re keeping it simple, just make sure you have a little slope and start running a hose at the top of the slide at the higher end (where you’ll start your slides from). Or if you have one or more lawn sprinklers, use those. For a little more money, pick up a 50-foot sprinkler hose and (if you also got the extra roll of Velcro) affix it to the side of the slide down one of the berms. Use your regular hose to feed water into it and you’ve got a perfect shower down your slide.