Easiest Dummy Stand Ever

When I made my duct tape dressmaker dummy, I built a stand for it from PVC pipe:

The pipe is four inches in diameter, and the foot it’s standing on is a toilet flange. (Not elegant, true, but efficacious.)

The ‘skeleton’ of my duct tape dummy is made of two-inch PVC pipe. The vertical piece comes out the bottom of the dummy and slides into the lower part of the stand. Here’s an image of just the body and the smaller diameter pipe:

Inside the large pipe are two PVC connectors: One is at the bottom, inside the pipe, and one is set into the top of the pipe. You can just see a a bit of duct tape around the top connector; it was a little loose, so I added the duct tape as padding to keep it firmly in place.

I hacked off the top of the upper connector piece to allow the narrower skeleton pipe to fit inside. I put the second connector into the four-inch pipe at the bottom, so that the two-inch pipe wouldn’t flop around inside. Then I set the four-inch pipe into the toilet flange. The flange gives the pipe enough support so that the dummy stands on its own.

That worked out fine, but a dummy is a whole lot more useful if it can be easily moved, so when one of our desk chairs broke, I put the internal connector onto the stem of the chair’s chassis, like this:

Then I just slipped the four-inch pipe assembly and the toilet flange over the connector, which gave me a rolling dummy.

So that’s the old version.

Last month, while scouting out home repair stuff, I noticed that Lowe’s still had some black PVC pipe in stock. Sleek, elegant black pipe! I bought it, and unexpectedly realized that my first stand (the white one above) was a lot more complicated than it needed to be.

At the hardware store, I assembled this kit:

The black pipe across the top isn’t as heavy as my original white pipe: It’s just three inches in diameter. The salvaged office chair base (whoops, not from the hardware store; it’s the one I already had) is on the left, and to the right of it are a PVC ring connector, and a PVC pipe cap (all from the plumbing supplies department).

After removing the old white two-inch pipe from inside the dummy, I slipped the new black pipe into the internal skeleton. Then I placed the black PVC ring on the stem of the chair base. The vertical black pipe fit into the ring, and voilà! my stand rolled again.

As a finishing touch, I removed the neck pipe, cut a new piece in black, attached the PVC cap (just so that it would match the rest of the stand), and that was it:

I can’t remember why my first version was so much more complicated. Serious overkill! My dummy is just lightweight duct tape and fiberfill, and doesn’t need the additional support of the larger pipe and inserts, although they would certainly be excellent for a heavier or larger dummy than mine.

I’m quite pleased with my new stand. It took only minutes to put together, and the black pipe is so much more attractive. Next up? A new dummy. I think I’ll make it of white duct tape, just so I can enjoy the contrast with the stand.