The Haunt at Hellizondo

Simi Plywood Massacre!

This weekend was the start of our most ambitious prop to date and probably the most expensive one. It’s expensive because plywood is expensive. I would have scaled this way down to save money, but I was fortunate enough to sell my old car instead of donating it. I say that means it counts as free money! So I set half of it aside for Halloween projects, and already half of that half has been spent! On plywood.

Can you guess what we are building? Tune in next week to find out. It’s 3 day weekend of doom!

This weekend was kinda stop and start, hit and miss. The forecast was for temps nearing 100F, but it turned out to be about 88F with nice breezes. This had kept enthusiasm down for working in the garage. People also had to work over the weekend. I also forgot to bring a lot of stuff and had to go to the hardware store. Twice.

On Sunday Zac, Tricia, and I got out to the garage and worked on a few things. We started making new LED spots based on Haunt the Yards’s how-to but scaled them up using thin walled 1″ pvc pipes and angles. This allows us to store the battery inside of the spot instead of having one loose outside of the spot, where it could easily get wet, dirty, or kicked. Tricia learned how to solder this weekend (she says it just like welding but way less dangerous) and really got into wiring up the spotlights. Zac worked on some clown corpse heads to go in his game booth that he built last week. I cast some jaws from my new jaw mold to go on Zac’s clown head craniums. The detail is very good, but the user freindly-ness could be better. The mold’s design was adapted from a design meant to do solid resin casts of a jaw, and not the rather brittle and lightweight foam castings. With care it makes very nice, very affordable jaw bones.

This will be our fourth year haunting. We did three years of Haunted Tiki Island, which was a success with the neighbors and found a few fans on the Internet. Three years is one more year than we planned. We had considered switching to a different theme after the second year of HTI, but we had more ideas for HTI and got more ambitious. Now that the third year has come and gone, and although we loved HTI, we need new creative challenges and mental space for new ideas. This year, we will be rolling out a new theme. Well, it’s new for us, but it’s a haunted house classic: the Haunted Carnival. But we’re going to make it as different and unusual as we can. We’re also going to try to make it as good as the third year of Haunted Tiki Island, which mean a lots of props and sets have to be built.

We got started last weekend with a couple of game booths. Something simple to start off on.

So far, So good!