Kristina’s Piggy Bank

Kristina loved her dad’s piggy bank and asked me for her own.  I searched high and low before finding the perfect one.  Surprisingly when I cut a slot in it and went to hollow it out, it was already hollow.   So a bit of paint and it was ready to go.

Wayne’s Big Piggybank

My ex brother in law was quitting smoking and decided that he was going to  collect all the money that he would otherwise spend on cigarettes and  put them in  the piggybank until it was full and then he wouldngo somewhere warm for the winter with the money.  So he put on his Christmas wish list that he wanted a big piggybank without a bottom  opening, so that he was not  tempted to rob the bank early, and so  that in the end he could use a sledge hammer to open it up.

I decided to find him that bank...  unfortunately after searching ebay,  chinatown and many of the local stores. all I could find were these  wimpy little banks that were at most 8.5 inches long, not nearly big  enough. Until, I finally wandered into a store in Branford and stubbed  my toe on a piece of lawn statuary while lookling at their Christmas  ornaments. Looking down I saw this large green pig lawn statue that is  almost 14 inches around grinning up at me.  Needless to say, I grabbed  it and took it home.

I knew from the weight that it should be hollow, so I grabbed my handy  Dremel motor tool and swiftly carved a coin slot in the top, only to  find that it was  filled with styrofoam.  This was a minor setback, particularly  as there was not enough room to chip it out through the slot, and I  didn’t want to make a bigger hole. Then I remembered my high school  chemistry classes and proceeded to go buy a quart of acetone.  I used a  funnel and poured it in and within two minutes the styrofoam was gone!  I carefully poured it out of the pig and back into the acetone container. Unfortunately the acetone dripped coming out of the pig and ate away a section of the verdigris paint around the coin slot.  What the heck, a pig should be pink, and acrylic paints are fairly cheap, so the piggy  bank went from green to pink.

All in all I was rather happy with it and my ex brother in law was ecstatic.  He managed to save enough to buy a slate topped pool table.