[tutorial] Tin Can Knight Game

A while ago I saw a reel on Instagram of people jousting with balloon-headed knights, made from tin cans. Where each had a shield and a spear. It looked like lots of fun to battle your friends, without the need of physically hurting them in reality.

Unfortunately, I didn’t safe the reel and also never found it again. But I tried to rebuild something similar to what I remembered from that video.

First, I made the shields. For this I cut out the shape from some left-over IKEA shelf back wall and plated it with pieces of tin can, which I cut with tin snips.

Next, I fabricated the blades of the halberds, which I wanted to use instead of spears. I simply sketched a design, copied it in the piece of tin can and cut it out with tin snips again. The shafts were just single use chop sticks, that I got from the sushi shop opposite of the Maschinenraum.

Likewise, I attached chopsticks to be back of the shields, by first attaching a block of leftover wood to the backside of them.

Now came the part, that I had the most trouble with. I wanted to 3D print some hoops, to attach to the body, which will hold the halberds and the shields. The idea was to print a dowel plate that goes inside the cans and a hoop with two holes that will be glued to the dowels. I wanted to print the hoops laying on the side and then drill the holes by hand. This didn’t work well, since the drill was wobbly, and there were almost no tolerances. The hoops themselves came out nicely but were destroyed after drilling.

So next I tried printing the hoops in a standing position, which had the advantage, that I couls print the holes and don’t have to drill them. The problem was that at one point the all detached and the 3D printer was only printing garbage. To solve that, I designed little detachable feet below the hoops, that can just be twisted off, after printing. This solved all the previous issues but introduced a new one: The hoops didn’t look nice, when printed in a standing position. I still settled for this version for now, though and am semi happy.

To attach the hoops to the body of the knights, I drilled two 4 mm holes on (approximately) the opposite sides of the can and stuck the dowel plate through it from the inside. Then the hoops were stuck on the dowels and were nicely attached, directly. There was no need for using glue.

The head of the knights are the target of the joust fight and were made from balloons. To keep them attached to the can, I used a piece of hemp yarn that I pulled through another whole of the tin can, which was drilled at the bottom of the „back“side of the can and can be knotted to the balloon and then tightened.

With this the knights are done, in theory and ready for a little test.

It was difficult to use the knights, when they are standing directly on the table and it is also dangerous if they can be moved (i.e., stabbing the other player), so I quickly built some stands from leftover beams.

The stands can be clamped to a table or fixed to the ground with a tent peg. For this I will drill fitting holes into the stands. The knight is attached to the stands with a single skrew through the bottom of the can.

Because the pointy tip of the weapons is easy to bend and it doesn’t reliably poke the balloon, I hot glued a sewing needle to both of them. I am not sure how long the glue will hold it in place, but for a first test battle it was good enough. We even rammed the halberds against the shields, to test the overall stability.

Unfortunately, we didn’t took any footage of the test fight, but here are some before and after pictures.

One of the hoops unfortunately did break. Before I was semi happy with the design, which now changed to only quarter happy. I need to redesign the hoops in future, I guess.

The test fight lasted only a few seconds. To make it more fun, it might be good to take longer sticks and put the cans further away. It might also be a good idea to add handles at the end of the sticks, for increased grip.