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Step 4Place the plaster hand on the rod and attach it to the rod.
Place the plaster hand on the rod and check the length of the rod. Minor adjustments can be made by screwing the rod further in or out of the wall.
Check the angle of the base (i.e., what's left of the arm) so that it fits snuggly against the wall. Sand it carefully if it needs adjustment.
Note that it's easy to repeatedly foul up the sanding, over correcting one way and then the other, and if you're not careful, ending up with a surface that is convex rather than flat.
It helps to use a large piece of sandpaper that's affixed to a flat surface, then sand carefully, ensuring that the finished surface is flat.
We took that approach and still ended up with something that was slightly off, as the second picture shows. Where we have it mounted most visitors will never have this side view.
To secure the hand to the rod and still allow room for the handle, a recessed area was carved out of the palm to hold a small hard nylon tube that I found in the small parts drawer in the fasteners aisle of the nearby home improvement store. (They may be labeled as "spacers.") This was used in order to provide a larger surface against which to tighten the small nut. (The shape of the palm made a traditional washer impractical.)
Note that the handle has a very slight taper. When we tested this with PVC, we realized that simply by slipping the rake into the hand from the top, with no other attachment than that offered by the pull of gravity, the taper was such that the hand would be in about the middle of the shaft when it "held" it.
Before we discovered this, we considered having to use various sizes of rubber washers or rubber bands around the shaft where you wanted it held. A worst case scenario would have been an invasive method, such as drilling a hole and inserting a small rod or nail perpendicular to the shaft that protruding on each side.
Check the angle of the base (i.e., what's left of the arm) so that it fits snuggly against the wall. Sand it carefully if it needs adjustment.
Note that it's easy to repeatedly foul up the sanding, over correcting one way and then the other, and if you're not careful, ending up with a surface that is convex rather than flat.
It helps to use a large piece of sandpaper that's affixed to a flat surface, then sand carefully, ensuring that the finished surface is flat.
We took that approach and still ended up with something that was slightly off, as the second picture shows. Where we have it mounted most visitors will never have this side view.
To secure the hand to the rod and still allow room for the handle, a recessed area was carved out of the palm to hold a small hard nylon tube that I found in the small parts drawer in the fasteners aisle of the nearby home improvement store. (They may be labeled as "spacers.") This was used in order to provide a larger surface against which to tighten the small nut. (The shape of the palm made a traditional washer impractical.)
Note that the handle has a very slight taper. When we tested this with PVC, we realized that simply by slipping the rake into the hand from the top, with no other attachment than that offered by the pull of gravity, the taper was such that the hand would be in about the middle of the shaft when it "held" it.
Before we discovered this, we considered having to use various sizes of rubber washers or rubber bands around the shaft where you wanted it held. A worst case scenario would have been an invasive method, such as drilling a hole and inserting a small rod or nail perpendicular to the shaft that protruding on each side.
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