My family tends to go a little overboard for Halloween. Our theme was Harry Potter, so we set out to make enough props to fill our rather small front yard. This Quidditch Trunk was just one of our DIY decorations. Our Flying Ford Anglia can been seen here: https://www.instructables.com/id/Flying-Ford-Angli....

Step 1: The Trunk

For this project we used a trunk we already had. the inside of the trunk was what everyone was going to focus on so I did not feel the need to spend time and money making an accurate housing for our quidditch gear. It is a very simple trunk that had been made out of scrap wood years ago. We added a block to the left wall that would function as a motor mount and a small hole was drilled in the back just big enough to fit a power cord.

Step 2: Back Panel

We used a screen shot from the first movie as the basis for our trunk design. It was difficult to find high quality images that showed the details of the lid panel. a piece of plywood was cut to fit the lid of the trunk we used and the design was drawn on and painted in. the shield in the center that depicts the four houses of hogwarts was painted on two separate halves and mounted on an additional piece cut to fit the full shield to raise it off the background a bit.

Step 3: Motor and Arms

Of course I was not thinking about how this would make a cool instructable while making the chest so I unfortunately do not have the best pictures of the inside mechanisms. a 12V wiper motor (purchased from http://www.monsterguts.com) was secured to the mounting block. the ball linkage was removed and an extension rod was added with arms that would allow for the bludgers to move. the arms were fine tuned and changed as we found problems; the wooden arms we started with would not stay in place after about 10 min of runtime. after switching to the metal strap ties held in place with lock nuts, we found that the end of the ties even after being rounded caused gouges in the bottom of the bludger balls, so PVC caps we had on hand worked to prevent damage to the bludgers.

Step 4: Fine Tuning the Movement of the Bludgers

Once we had the arm figured out we thought it was just a matter of putting it all together and adding paint, we were wrong. the bludgers ended up being too light and overtime the arms underneath hit them they would turn, since we did not want them turning, which ruined the fighting against the chains effect we were going for, we needed to come up with a system that would allow the balls to be hit from underneath but not get caught in the motion of the spinning arms. we settled on a frame of leftover foam insulation and wood slats housing a piece of foam mat that when hit by the arms would be pushed into the balls allowing for a jumping motion instead of a spinning motion. It's not sophisticated of pretty but it worked and we were able to do it with scraps from other projects.

the balls used to make the bludgers were simple vinyl bouncing balls purchased at the dollar store. we added a few layers of rubberized paint to give them some durability and a couple of coating of brown leather colored paint. the caps meant to look like they are holding the balls down were cut from old vinyl placemats and the chains were taken from a set of hanging basket planters that had seen better days. the chains were secured to a luan plywood ring with mini U-bolts.

Step 5: Quaffle and Finishing Touches

once the bludgers were installed in their final places, the quaffle was put in place. the rings around the balls are made of leftover luan plywood and painted to match the image we were basing our trunk on and glued into place so they wouldn't move.

the Quaffle was made from a foam ball purchased at the craft store. the ball was shaped using a hot-wire foam cutter and a half-circle piece of wood with 120 grit sand paper glued to it. paint and voila, a quaffle.

The beater bat seen in the previous step were simple foam bats found at the dollar store, the handles were cut down to shorten them and they were painted.