Why a Troll Belt?

If you look through my instructables you will be able to work out that I look after a nature reserve, part of my work is to teach kids & adults about the natural world..... most of what I teach is true, but not everything :)

This years theme for Halloween is trolls and other woodland folk, I have a large wooden foot shape that we use in mud to create troll footprints but at night that is not going to be that easy to see so a new prop was required!

There is a very old, very dead Beech tree with large fruiting bodies of Ganoderma fungi running up the trunk. It is often described to the kids as "the fairy climbing wall", it has a very large broken bough hanging from it, this is where the belt will be found and the story be told of the young troll who was chasing the fairies and followed them up the tree, he slipped and fell, his belt got hooked on the bough. His fall was broken by the bough and the belt breaking.

A look at the label will show that the belt, from the well known company "Top troll" as for ages 7 to 10, the same age as the kids, and is "small". I should be able to wrap it around at least 2 kids to give them an idea of how big a troll we are dealing with!

For the cost of postage I was able to get a piece of conveyor belt 2 metres long and 200 mm wide, that is 6ft - 6" X 8" for the non metricated.

I had various bits of brass knocking around in the workshop, bits of tube for the middle bar and tang and the perfect piece 200mm x 175mm x 4mm, for the front plate which soon had the corners rounded off.

Other materials:

canvas cloth for the label

2 M4 diameter screws

2 M4 diameter clinch nuts

silver solder and soft solder.

The middle of the brass front plate was drilled for each internal corner and in the middle of a long side. the center was then removed using a band saw.

The gap created to get the saw into the middle was silver soldered closed.

Both of these parts are from thick wall brass tube which were both annealed before the back strap was flattened at both ends the tang was flattened and shaped at one end only.

These 2 pieces were then silver soldered together in a Tee shape, the ends of the back strap were then tinned with soft solder, as was the back of the front plate in readiness for final assembly.

The buckle needed to be attached to the belt, to do this I cut drilled and notched a piece of 2mm brass sheet then folded it to go around the back strap, the the belt will slot into the gap and be held in place with a couple of screws.

I cut the belt into 2 pieces in a rough fashion so that it looked as if it could have snapped, I shaped one end to go through the buckle and drilled some holes along the length, one of which the tang was pushed through. The middle bar was then soft soldered to the front plate ... being careful not to burn the belt.

The attachment plate was then clipped around the back strap clinch nuts were inserted through predrilled holes in the back of the plate and the end of the belt strap, a pair of screws hold it all together.

To help with the story I wanted to attach a label.

I had a piece of stiff waterproof material that I laser engraved with information of interest about the belt.

This may look like a lot of work for one event, and it would be, but, we get a number of schools who book the kids in for a day in the woods and specifically ask if we can do the fairy and troll walk with them... of course we can! Out with the troll footprints in the mud and from now on the troll belt.