Compositor Bin Upcycled Into Children's Space Capsule Lander.

Clearing out the garden I found I had two composting bins I didn't need. I tried the usual way I get rid of useless junk, sorry, valuable pre-loved items, and left them on the front drive for anyone to pick up. The smaller one went, but the other one refused to roam. However, I was then about to put it on Freecycle when I saw someone else had put one on and described it as "Large, like a Dalek" and that gave me an idea. I'm not sure what the original idea was but it finally emerged into turning it into a play Space Lander for toddlers for a local community centre.

This is the voyage of the Compostitator Beagle.
Its continuing mission:

To explore strange new worlds.

To seek out new life and new civilizations.

To boldly go where no compostitator has upcycled before!

One large old composting bin or an abandoned alien compostitator, the bigger the better, especially if it looks like a decapitated Dalek. Important: make sure it is the kind that is bigger at the bottom than the top and has a lid rather than a bottom. If it is the other kind, you may of course be able to use it by turning it upside down, but I've not tried that so I can't guarantee it will work.

Empty bleach bottle

Length of plastic pipe

Two bolts, washers and nuts

Some bungee cord

Some fabric

Paint

Brush

Electric multitool or jigsaw or the traditional sweat inducing manual hole saw.

Like all of my great ideas, it had to start somewhere and this was it. Like all of my great ideas, the final result ends up looking nothing like them. I like to think of this as being part of the natural creative development process from a concept to a final polished article with sophisticated changes/upgrades on the way. I think the technical terms for this are "bad planning" and "bodging".

After looking at it, I decided it was big enough to hold a couple of toddlers so the project was a go, Houston. In order to make sure it was safe and easy to use I decided to go with a fabric curtain door which would be attached to a bungee cord. I had originally considered using the cut-out piece on hinges but decided it was a risk to trapping little fingers. Plus I didn't have any hinges. I'm not sure why the fabric door idea is any better really because I don't have a sewing machine or appropriate fabric either but someone else will do that once it's landed on its final planetary resting place.

You will notice the finished design doesn't include thrusters or fuel tanks. I thought mixing toddlers with rocket exhausts and explosive liquids possibly wasn't a great idea but maybe I'll add them later. For the pedants amongst you, yes, I did realise that it wasn't fully sealed against a vacuum so the occupants may struggle to breath on re-entry but this was done deliberately. Have you ever heard a a toddler's scream? As anyone who has been there will tell you, in space, no-one can hear you scream, so I thought this might be an advantage to any stressed parents. Plus if necessary, the toddlers can wear space suits, some of which apparently have built in nappies so it's win-win, especially I won't be the one having to take them off.

So, time to NASA up this baby and get it into full flight readiness.

You've seen the design so here's the construction instruction.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so, if my maths is right, that should save me about three thousand words with the above pictures. (I used the formula Nwords_saved=Npictures x 1000)

Step 1:

Cut out some holes for a door and windows using a saw or other hole making tool.

Step 2: there is no step 2) in the initial construction.

A bit light on detail? Come on, you're cutting holes in a plastic compositor to turn it into a space capsule. It's hardly rocket science is it?

There is some post construction stuff you need to do though to make it a safer for the little astronuts and the design is cleverer than it looks, pretty much the reverse of me. I rounded off all sharp edges so the aforementioned little fingers wouldn't get hurt using a file and a scraper (I mean I was using the file and scraper, not the toddler). In case you were considering it, giving toddlers files and scrapers is just foolhardy. I have a firm policy regarding which of my hand and power tools I let toddlers use. Other parents may disagree, that's their choice, but I've seen far too many incidents with toddlers running around with chainsaws and blowtorches at play groups. You could use sandpaper, but in my case I didn't have any. You'll also notice I stopped cutting the door before it reached the bottom rather than all the way down. This was to keep the structural integrity of the lander well integrated, something I learnt from Elon Musk's earlier attempts at making a lander land. However, I realised this edge was probably not rounded enough for little knobbly knees so I made a couple of 1"/2.5cm cuts on the ends of the bottom door edge and then used a heat gun to run along this edge so I could fold it over. This also had the side effect of making that edge stronger. Be careful with the heat gun though unless you are going for a "Burnt up on re-entry" aesthetic.

Now the easy bit.

Get some paint and do what you like. I liked the lander/escape pad idea (see what I did there?) but you can go your own way and turn it in to a teepee or a mushroom house for example. But not a Dalek, that would be just too obvious and also might scare the little blighters, although you could use that to filter out the undesirable kids. If they go up to the Dalek and embrace it with both arms, it could be they are in to planetary domination so it might be worthwhile keeping your kids away from them. On the other hand, if it is your kid maybe you've found a skill in them that you can develop?

When I did start painting this I realised two things:

1) The cheap paint I had ran but didn't cover too well.

2) The cheap brushes I used didn't allow for fine painted edges.

Being a cheapskate, I decided to rationalise the final end result instead of upgrading to better paint and brushes on the following grounds:

1) It was designed for toddlers and therefore it would be good design practice for it to look childlike.

2) I wanted it to have a hand-made aesthetic, not a factory mass-produced perfect finish.

3) Anybody who complains about the paint job can always repaint it themselves.

(I applied the same criteria also for the slightly wonky windows and door cut-out as I found the multitool wanted to go one way whilst the compostitator wanted to it to go another. In the end, they both compromised and decided to sometimes go this way and sometimes that whilst I just watched a vaguely right shape emerge.)

I decided after painting it that it needed an aerial or a flagpole. This was easy enough as I had a bit of plastic pipe just waiting to be used for that purpose. I just drilled a couple of holes in the pipe and through the handle and bolted the pipe on. There is more to this design though than you might expect. I first put a wooden block inside the handle so it wouldn't collapse when I tightened the bolts and drilled through that at the same time. I also used dome headed nuts on the bolts so there weren't any shaped bits for the aforementioned little fingers to get hurt on.

So, you could then go to put a flag on it or maybe attach a plastic colander to make a radar scanner. Or you could go to the deluxe version, as I have done, and attached a bleach bottle alien head. I'm not exactly sure if this is an alien with a long neck or a Predator type trophy but the alien hasn't been very forthcoming whenever I've asked it anything.

So all that's left is to give your lander a name. Mine is called "The Beagle", not because I like dogs (I don't, I'm more a cat person and I don't even like those!) but just so I can end this Indestructible by saying:

"Mission Control, the Beagle has landed!"

ps If you were wondering what the alien's name is, it's unpronounceable by a human voice, so I've nicknamed it/her/him Freddy the Beagle in recognition of its/hers/his ability to fly whilst landing upside down.