The Think Tank

Halloween preparations are well underway here at Crestfallen Manor.  We got quite a bit of work done over the weekend, but unfortunately I’ve come down with a cold and haven’t gotten much done since then.  There will undoubtedly be more updates later, but here are a few photos from the setup this weekend.  As always you can see the photos by clicking on the image in this post, or by going to the Gallery page.

The last minute preparations are done and the little ones are starting to trickle in. For the first time in a very long time everything i wanted to have in the display this year appears to be up and running!

Time to get my costume on and get this shindig started!

Hope to see you all tonight…

Happy Halloween!!!  It’s currently just a little before 5AM and we are just finishing up with the Pumpkin carving for the night.  Which is not to say we are finished yet: we still have two to go.  Honestly, I’m not sure if they are going to get done or not.  Hopefully, but I’m pretty tired right now and there are several things that still need to be taken care of for tomorrow night later tonight.

The pumpkins look awesome!  Thanks to everyone who came out and helped carve!  I think this is definitely one of the best crops ever!

I hope that everyone who reads this will be able to make it over tonight for All Hallow’s Eve as I think it should be one of the best ones yet.  And if you can’t make it, then I hope you have a great night and that all of your Trick Or Treat wishes come true!

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!

As  I mentioned in the earlier post, one of the projects I really wanted to get done this year was an upgrade to the voicebox for our new Crypt Keeper jumping skeleton prop.

For our run through party I used the Christmas light remote control from last year, but it was just too flaky to be reliable.  Especially given that if the signal didn’t get turned off after about 2/1o of a second the damn MP3 player thought I was trying to turn it off and wouldn’t play the sound.  And the sound just has to be heard… its Bruce Campbell’s voice from Army of Darkness saying “Hail to the King, baby!” followed by Vincent Price laughing at the end of Thriller.

To correct that problem I wired a lightswitch into the middle of an extension cord and used that briefly – it worked much better than the remote, but it was not really ideal.  Fortunately for me, my friend Jim is an electrician and he was able to set me up with a timed relay and a much, much better wireless transmitter/receiver.

He came over last night and we got the whole thing setup and working just about perfect… I still need to adjust the timing a little bit so you hear Ash’s voice saying “Hail to the King, baby!”, then the skeleton jumps out of his chair in unison with the laughing.  My hope is that the voice will really attract your attention, so when he jumps out of his chair it will be that much scarier.

I really want to send a shout out to Jim for helping me with this.  I really appreciated it, although he may live to regret it.  I imagine I’ll be picking his brain frequently from now on.

Even without the sound working most of the time, he caused some really good screams during the Pre-Party.  I can hardly wait to see the new incarnation on Halloween night.

Well, we’ve worked long and hard and we’ve finally managed to get the halloween decorating finished!  And we even did it in time for our Halloween Pre-Party on Saturday.

Mom and Maure spent the morning and afternoon cooking up some really great food for the party, while Shannon and I finished up the last minute decorating and party preparations, including setting up the voicebox for the Crypt Keeper.  By the time that 5pm rolled around, I had officially put a close to this years halloween decorating.

The party went great and I think everyone had a good time.  Most everyone we invited showed up and shared some good food, good laughs and some good brews.  Although, I was a little disappointed in how the pumpkin and apple beers turned out: they were pretty lacking in flavor compared to usual.  Most people said they were still good though, so I guess if you didn’t have a reference point you weren’t as disappointed.

I still have a couple of projects left, namely to finish updating the soundbox for the crypt keeper and to fix the fog machines.

*** UPDATE  ***

This project is now 99.9% done!  As you can see from the picture, we have finished the sign for the top and we have also finished the mechanics of the Crypt Keeper and the voicebox is fully functional – I just have to adjust the timing and he’s done.  Should only take about 10-20 minutes.

***   End ***

We worked for about 10 hours on Friday afternoon and night to finish the construction of the crypt.  Mike and Mairi came over for a while and helped me and mom put the plywood up, and then I carved out the gaps between the stones while mom and Mo painted it.  We finished up around midnight or a little after.

The front and north sides are the only two that really show, so I didn’t bother with the styrostone on the back or the south side, I just left them plywood painted the same stone color as the rest.

Construction of the new Crestfallen Mausoleum is well under way!  I had originally hoped to the use an Easy-Up tent frame for the Mausoleum but after a little testing it turned out that just wasn’t going to work.  After a little thinking, I decided I just needed to buck up and build a wood frame for it.

I’ll update this post later with complete construction details including a material list if anyone is interested.

I measured the yard where it was going to live, and decided to make it 4x6x7 feet.  The four foot depth looks a little funny from the side, but is very convenient because a single sheet of styrofoam will cover the whole thing.  I thought about making it 4×4 but it looked too narrow from the front.  Six feet looks much better.

A couple of years ago I made a skeleton that sits up out of a coffin in the yard and yells at unsuspecting trick or treaters.  I used a wireless remote that we use for Christmas lights later in the year and I used the soundboard from a cheap halloween prop to power his voice.

The wireless remote worked perfectly in every trial I put it through, but became very sketchy both years at the height of Halloween night: half the time it would not pop up, and when it did it often did not play the audio like it was supposed to.   My theory for the two problems are these: I think the wireless remotes are getting interference from lots of cell phones in the vicinity, and the voicebox I rigged up was always pretty hokey and needed redoing.

We’ve been busy busy busy!  As always I am behind schedule but all in all I am doing pretty well.  We managed to get the vast bulk of the outside decorating done over the weekend, leaving only the spiderwebs (which we usually wait to do in deference to the weather) and the building of new projects and repairing/updating of the new Voicebox for the Coffin Popper and the continuous fog machines, and the construction of the new crypt I want to build.

Full photos are available at thinktankgallery.com and will be updated as I get the new pics taken.