Halloween Circus Wagon

This is my 3rd Halloween of going the extra mile to make my daughter happy and excited on that special, spooky day. In previous years, I have written instructables for her Halloween space shuttle wagon and Daniel Tiger Trolley wagon. The theme is the wagon. :) Each year I'm doing a little bit more to raise the bar with the goal of incorporating the wagon, since it's free transportation. My wife and I wanted to do something this year that not everyone does, so when my kiddo got excited when she saw a circus ringleader costume online, that sealed the deal and I was going to build her a circus wagon! But this Halloween circus wagon had to be a little tricked out... :)

• 1/2" thick plywood
• 2" x 2" posts
• 1" x 6" common boards
• 1/8" thick plywood
• Spare 2" x 4"s lying around
• Wooden numbers and stars from the dollar store
• Arcade style buttons
• 22 gauge wire
• Empty cigar box lying around
• Rust Oleum Paint + Primer Colonial Red spray paint (8 cans)
• Rust Oleum Paint + Primer Gold spray paint (2 cans)
• Rust Oleum Paint + Primer White spray paint (1 can)
• Resin decorative mouldings (made out of wood, obtained from Home Depot or whatever home store is near you)
• 1 Radio Flyer wagon
• Black rope
• Copper wire LEDs
• Bluetooth speaker
• Raspberry Pi 4
• 1/4" PVC pipe
• Foamboard (to make the CIRCUS lettering)
• Wood glue (and lots of it)
• 2 LED headlights
• Velcro straps
• 4 staircase posts (from Home Depot or whatever home store is near you)
• 1 comically oversized stuffed giraffe, and lots of other cute, snuggly stuffed animals
• 2 USB batteries

There are lots of different images online for how cool the vintage traveling circus wagons look. They are ornate, colorful, and majestic. Many commonalities exist between them:

• They all have writing of some form on them which can be as simple as saying "CIRCUS" or more loquacious like "Barnum and Bailey Circus: The greatest show on earth".
• They all seem to have highly decorative features of swirls and ribbons at the top (that looks like it would take years for the hobbyist to carve out by hand)
• They are all usually a deep red color
• They all have bars of some form to hold the animals in
• They have a small seat in the front where the wagon driver would sit and steer the horses pulling the cart
• They seem to have a number designation on them under where the driver would sit
• They had a door at the back to bring in or take out the animals

Capturing as many of these features as possible simply adds to the realism and wowness factor of the project. Given I had about a month, I had to pick and choose where to spend my time. Additionally, I wanted the project to be cost-effective. So, after thinking through the risk-reward analysis I decided on:

• Cutting out the letters in "CIRCUS" from foamboard (the foamboard came from the dollar store)
• Purchasing staircase posts from the home store to mimic some of the decorative posts at the corners of the wagons (this was inexpensive); buy resin decorative mouldings at the home store to satisfy the requirement of the highly ornate pieces at the top of the wagon (slightly more expensive that I anticipated). Cut out arches from 1/8" plywood (already had this lying around from a wobble board I build for my kiddo) and screw those onto the wagon to enhance the antiquated look
• Purchasing deep red spray paint which would be far cheaper and easier than getting a gallon of paint
• Purchasing black rope to mimic the bars
• Making the small seat out of spare common/pine board lying around
• Purchasing wooden numbers (again purchased from the dollar store) that I would spray paint white
• Make a simple wooden door with a cut out crescent moon from pieces of scrap wood lying around as well as hinges and various other accoutrements

Additional things I decided to do were:

• Install buttons for my daughter to press that would control spotlights, play animal sounds, and cycle through different pieces of circus music
• Wrap copper wire LEDs around the black rope for extra ambiance
• Hide the electronics underneath the front driver seat to keep it tucked away

Each of the 2 previous Halloween builds have begun by taking the dimensions of the empty Radio Flyer wagon in order to insert a frame made of 2-by-4s with a roughly 2' x 4' piece of 1/2" plywood screwed onto the top that gives me a base to build onto. This prevents any drilling or damage to the wagon itself. It's important to countersink screws when assembling the 2-by-4s so that they don't scrape along the inside of the wagon and scratch it. This step makes is crucial because if you ever want to get the wagon back, you just phone a friend to help you lift the plywood base out of the wagon and voila!

This step is really customizable, and is whatever works for you. In my case, I had to accommodate a huge giraffe (that just takes up space in my house, but we can't get rid of) so that caused me to build this thing a bit high. So high, that I worried about the contraption wobbling when I pulled it down the street. I hate to admit that I did not really plan this part out really well. I'm impulsive and impatient. I kinda just want to start building and doing -- sometimes to my detriment. Luckily, this did not bite me this time :) Nonetheless, I had some experience from building the trolley last year, and knew what pieces needed to be there for rigidity and stability.

I was pretty excited to do the door and front seat. I thought I was going to have this perfectly geometric crescent moon since I've likely forgotten more math than most people have learned in a lifetime, but once again it just goes to show that book smarts doesn't always equate to real world smarts. My crescent moon left much to be desired. Since my kiddo is 3, however, she was going to be over the moon about her moon (independent of its flaws) and well, that just made be happy. I bought some hinges from the dollar stores, had a hook lying around and then just put it all together.

For the seat it took a little more work since there I had to take out my jigsaw to make the curved cuts and then do a bit of sanding but all in all it wasn't too bad. What is not shown on the front seat, is the 1/8" piece of plywood that I secured to the front of it to make a little box enclosure that would house the electronics. If that convoluted explanation made zero sense, some pics later on will hopefully clarify.

Now we're getting to the good stuff. Applying the paint ALWAYS makes me feel like I can see the finish line. Once I did the wagon in red, the wooden numbers in white, and the decorative pieces (including the staircase posts and stars in gold), it started to really look sharp. Applying glue to all the decorative pieces and allowing it to dry overnight made it totally immovable.

For the "bars" I took the rope and wrapped it around preset screws that I drilled on the inside. The pattern was at the top, I would wrap it around the screw, pull it vertically down, wrap it around the screw at the bottom, pull it to the screw at the right, wrap it around that, pull vertically upwards, and repeat. One of the pics above shows this more clearly. (Again, I'm just failing on writing clear instructions tonight. Good thing this site isn't designed to have hobbiysts clearly explain themselves :P )

Lastly, I cut out the letters for CIRCUS from the foamboard an glued those into place alongside other wooden stars that were painted gold. This really was the nail in the coffin for making it look awesome!

I've had a bit of practice on this for a couple of years now, so it was old hat. I wanted my daughter to be able to press buttons to perform specific actions like I mentioned in the design section. But to recap: turn on spotlights, play animal sounds, and play circus music. I bought some arcade buttons from Amazon that I installed on an old cigar box I had lying around which I spray painted gold. I ran the wires through the cigar box and up the inside of the wagon to a hole which led to under the front seat which acted like an electronics cabinet that housed the RPi 4 and USB battery. When my wife saw the wires on the inside of the wagon she thought it looked messy (which it did). So, I spray painted a 1/4" piece of PVC pipe and ran the wires through that and used a velcro strap to attach it to the wagon itself. Similarly, for the spotlights that would sit at the top but inside of the wagon, I used velcro to secure them to the wagon chassis.

The last important bit was the Python code to make everything run. Luckily, I had code I could reuse from the trolley project last Halloween and I told my wife I could simply modify that and I'd be done. Well, she's all like "You know, it's never that easy -- there's always bugs -- you're going to need to debug it etc." and I'm all like "nuh-uh -- it's gonna work because I'm fly", and 99% of the time she's right. 99% of the time, what I thought would be a 15 minute endeavor turned out to be much more frustrating and time consuming. But folks...folks...this time...was that magical 1%. After 20 minutes of changes, it just worked! Woohoo for being at the tail end of the distribution!

A huge upgrade between Halloween 2020 and 2021 is that last year, in order to kick everything off in the RPi, I had to manually connect a keyboard, monitor, and mouse and pair the Bluetooth speaker and finally launch the Python script. What a pain! Since the mods to the Python script this year worked right out of the gate, it freed up time to look for other solutions which allow me to bootup without a human-in-the-loop. This is exactly what happened. I took a cue from this RPi stackexchange link to take care of the bluetooth automatically, and from there was able to push all of the startup to my .bashrc file. It was very gratifying to just have it all work when I powered up the RPi via a USB switch!

I don't like to post pictures of my daughter online so unfortunately I can't visually capture her level of excitement. But imagine this: 3 year olds find EVERYTHING exciting. Well, not everything, I suppose. My kid does not find rutabagas exciting, but that's another conversation. Needless to say, I received many hugs and kisses and was told it was simply beautfiful. It melted my grown-up papa heart.

Halloween night was magical. My daughter had an amazing time. Her ringleader costume was beautifully made by an Etsy vendor and I was encouraging my wife to send her pictures of the final product! :) She had a memorable time walking up and down the streets hearing the oohs-and-ahhs from the kids, parents, on-lookers, and families giving out candy (and it put some extra pep in my step too). I hope this is something she will remember and carry with her during her life. Being able to have the time, and financial ability to support projects like this makes me feel lucky that I can make these memories with her.

Evil aside: As we passed by one group of parents and kids towards the end of the evening, I heard one little girl sniffle lightly and say to her dad "Daddy, can you make me one of those"....YESSSSS, your father is inferior I thought! Muahahaha. Ok, it's a tad evil of me, but it felt good!