In a typical piñata, a suspending rope is fastened with some wire to the top of the piñata. That works well with a one-pound piñata holding two pounds of candy . . . but this sucker weighs a little bit more just on its own, and it's going to hold slightly more in the way of candy. If the rope (or ropes) are just attached to the top of the head, I fear the weight of the candy would cause the roof of the mouth to give way:
My (entirely untested) solution is to support the candy's "floor", rather than the candy's ceiling. If I fix the ropes to the roof of the mouth, and run them through the top of the head, then the roof of the mouth will be less inclined to buckle (as it won't be supported from the edges, but from the middle):
Now the candy stays safely in its piñata home forever! (Forever = "until 2 minutes after the whacking starts")I picked up some perforated steel plates, some zinc-plated brass rings, and braided nylon rope at Ace Hardware.
The steel plates were epoxied directly to the roof of the mouth (to the "bottom" of the cardboard, not the top as shown in the illustration above). Since the epoxy filled in the perforations, I drilled out the holes again, and then ran lengths of rope through some of the holes.Pro tip: Because nylon rope needs the ends melted to prevent fraying, I've found it's easier to just cut the rope BY melting it. Apply a flame where you want to "cut", and when the rope starts balling up over the flame, tug gently on each end. You get much cleaner, and nicely tapered "cuts".
Back to the upper side of the roof-of-the-mouth sheet, I attached the rope ends for each steel plate to a brass ring. I chose a hangman's knot because it's self-tightening under strain, and because it's easily untied if you mess something up (which I did, repeatedly). So with four tiny nooses around each brass ring, the palate was ready to be inserted into the upper jaw (finally).
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