This was the first annual Canstruction Madison event and our first time participating in one. We wanted to make something easily recognizable. Our fondness for Disney parks led us to build a rendition of the castle in Disney's Magic Kingdom in Florida. The real castle is over 18 stories tall, making ours a roughly 1:26 scale model.

We designed our castle in Sketchup to use normal sized cans for the walls and tuna cans for the turrets.

Using the Sketchup model, we measured the position of the cans for the bottom layer and put each can into place. We taped sheets of poster board together so that we could trace where each can went. This would help us rebuild the structure easily at the venue on the day of the event.

After we stacked the first three layers of cans, we wrote a number on each piece of paper. We then took pictures of all of the areas so that we could print them out and use them to guide us on the day of the event.

Particleboard was cut and placed on top of the third layer of cans. On top of the board we continued to stack cans. This layer of board is what allowed us to open up the tunnel below it. Here the front of the castle was starting to take shape. The tuna cans that were stood up on their ends didn't roll off due to the concave shape of the can surface below it.

The walls that had already been built weren't enough to keep the particleboard in shape. With the additional weight that was about to go on top, we needed to add some more support. We added a few stacks of cans inside the walls for this purpose.

Using the same numbers and measurements from the poster board on the floor, we marked the grid onto the particleboard.

After two new layers of cans, another sheet of particleboard went up with the grid marked on it. We traced the cans on the bottom side of the board and used a jigsaw to cut off the edges.

It was good to see that the tunnel was still a tunnel. Now we had to work on hiding the particleboard. In the second picture you can sort of see the peppermint patties we dumped into the middle board layer. To eventually cover the plywood that would be our base at the event, we choose a green fabric to fit around the structure.

To get ready for the event, we took down the entire structure and packed the cans back into their boxes. We would drive them to the venue a few days before where they would sit off to the side with the cans from all of the teams. This made it easier for everyone to get started building as soon as the event started.

We placed the paper grid a bit off-center from the plywood to leave room for the paper towel monorail.

Using the pictures of the cans and the grid from back in the shop, we started stacking cans. We made sure to keep the most silver sides of the cans facing outwards.

In the second picture you can see the tunnel and the peppermint patties illuminated by LEDs.

It took a few hours to get all of the structure built. We had some time to spare and some finishing touches to add, including the fireworks made of Christmas lights.

In this final picture you can see the paper towel monorail and Cinderella and Prince Charming standing illuminated in the castle above the entrance.

The structure won the Structural Ingenuity award.

All of the food was donated to the food pantry.