The Think Tank

Several years ago I found some inexpensive fog machines which would continue to produce fog as long as the button was pressed.  This was a great improvement over my other foggers which only operated for 40-50 second bursts and then required several minutes to reheat.  The foggers worked great for the practice runs but crapped out during the middle of Halloween night.  The next year I returned the faulty units and purchased some new ones, which worked fantastic for Halloween night – especially in conjunction with the  fog chillers we built.  The constant output produced a think ground fog when the wind was still, and refilled the yard very quickly between gusts if it was blustery.

I looked at buying higher end models, but the cheapest constant fogger I found was $250 and I didn’t want to spend that much.  So I decided to pull the apart and see if I could fix the ones I had – after all, they were broken anyway, what more could I do them?

Two of them seemed to have bad power supplies or transformers, and one of them tried to work by the motor sounded funny and did not produce much smoke.  I solved that problem by transplanting the motor from one of the other units, which gave me one fully functioning fogger.  I later learned that the motor from that one was actually OK, it was the pump housing which was making the noise, and I was able to correct that with a little bit of liquid graphite on the impeller.

Now I had two working units.

The next one I ripped open seemed to have a bad transformer.  I tried to get one at Fry’s but they did not have the part I needed.  Fortunately my friend Jim – who also helped me with Crypt Keeper voicebox – was able to get me a transformer that fit my needs.  It was actually a wall unit instead of a wired transformer as was originally in there, but aside from looking a little funny it works perfectly.  That is all I really care about any way.

The third fogger  had a bad transformer as well, but after I replaced that tonight I discovered that it also has something wrong with its motor: it spins, but not fast enough to effectively pump any fluid into the heating element.

Given that we are going to start carving pumpkins tomorrow and are basically out of time, I will just use the two resurrected foggers and call it good.  Fog Machine C can get fixed in time for next year, and we can really smoke out the whole neighborhood!