Mother Ginger Plastic Structure

Having the weekend with my husband to help with the building of Mother Ginger's skirt is great!

I've agreed to try the plastic pipe in hopes of doing away with the wooden support structure and making it lighter for the dancer to just use straps to hold up the skirt. Using a plywood platform for the top of the skirt would be easier to construct but more expensive.

We bought:
4- 1 inch schedule 40 pipes (schedule 40 is thicker) ($17.50)
4- 1/4 inch 4 inch machine round head, screws with nuts ($2.10)
100 feet of 1/2 inch white Plex pipe ($28.52)
Plex pipe connectors ($4.82)

What we had on hand:
duct tape, 2- 36" hula hoops

 After being screwed together the crossed PVC was placed on a cart to start temporarily attaching the Plex Pipe. The screws needed to be very tight so the center section would remain a box and not an angular parallelogram. 

 After duct taping the Plex pipe to the ends of the PVC there was significant bowing in between the cross beams. Spying 2 hula hoops in the garage I suggested we attach them to the Plex pipe and the center cross beams. This worked to some degree but adding the hula hoops were still not stable. Adding a cross piece diagonally near the center of the crosses did the trick. If you look closely you can see the cross piece goes underneath the PVC but is on top of the hoops.
We need 2 more hula hoops before we can secure the Plex pipe to the ends of the PVC supports.

This is actually shown from underneath.