The Haunt at Hellizondo

It was such a nice weekend weather-wise. Spring returns to Southern California at the End of July. It was unseasonably cool and I loved it.

This weekend we concentrated on building creatures for our carousel. I postponed actually finishing the carousel first because I hurt my back. I am trying to let it heal properly before I return to the “Back-Breaking” work that is left to do.

Zac is building a mermaid. I did the ribs for him in an effort to try and make all of these similar in size. It looks good but the size overall seems too small. We will have to assemble the carousel and eyeball it to see if it is sized right. It might just need to be chunkier. The body of my dragon is next to his mermaid, you can see how it looks smallish by comparison.

Kendra is building her first monster ever, a griffin. I am helping with the hard stuff, but trying to get Kendra comfortable with building these kind of props. She did the ribcage by herself and bent the neck using a heat gun. I am sculpting the head for her. We’ll work together on the wings and other big parts.

Patty is building a horse like creature. Will it be a unicorn? zebra giraffe hybrid? The 4th horse of the apocalypse? Stay tuned. I did the ribs on this, and helped repose it after I sorted out some problems with my own prop and Kendra’s griffin.

I started my Three Headed Dragon this weekend. I put the ribs on, and bent the necks to the right position. I got started on bulking them out, but didn’t get much further. I will finish this at home during the week. It will have small wings in the front instead of arms. In the back it will have drumstick type legs with some big claws and a devil shaped tail.

Patty’s cannon is coming along, and her little sidekick is finished. I call him “Mr. Chuckles”.

We plan on finishing the carousel construction next week. Then we’ll figure out if we can fit in all 6 monsters we planned to build. We think we might have made them too big, so we might have to do just 4 monsters, which would be easier.

It had to happen eventually. Our unseasonably cool summer finally got back to the business of being hot as heck. 104f with high humidity. On Saturday it was just Kendra, Patty, and myself. We went over our build list and ate ice cream cones. Sipped cold sodas and chatted, and tried not to sweat.

Patty started building her cannon. This is going to go up on the roof over looking the drive way. It will have a burnt up blucky danging out of the mouth of the cannon and puffs of smoke from a fog machine hidden inside. The cannon is made up of a concrete form with pipe insulation as the lip on the cannon barrel, and last years candy cauldron as the cascabel.

I cast some skulls from the new mold I made of a coyote skull. These will be the basis of some of the carousel creatures’ heads. I figure with a little clay these can become serpent, dragon, or bird skulls.

For our carousel we are going to have six creatures on poles. Now I can’t make them all, and that would be hogging all the fun, but we need them to kind of be the same. They need to be the same general size at least. So to homogenize them a little bit I built the frames all the same. I’ll rough in the ribs and basic body shape, but I’ll leave the number of limbs, size, shape, and position to my fellow haunters.

On Sunday  some people had to work, and others (me) went to the beach so nothing got done. This next weekend is supposed to be 20 degrees cooler and we should be able to finish a lot more.

Leadership Lesson #427: If a large project does not progress quickly it will become demoralizing.

This was the 5th weekend working in the garage. After some technical setbacks in the last few weeks, I finally made real progress on the carousel. I rebuilt the center column to be much lighter, and re-skinned it with 1/8′ luan. The fit and finish looks professional now. I also rebuilt the round sections to break down for storage and added some guides and stops to make the pieces interlocking. This will will make assembly much faster! I also redid the support frame to make it much stronger.

Zac and I roughed out a form for the carousel creatures in PVC. The big tube in the center is so that the creatures can be slipped onto the poles on carousel, but easily taken off for storage. Which end is which? I don’t know yet.

I bought a coyote skull to use as the basis of the head for some of the creatures. I am going to make a mold of it and make 7-10 copies. So I started filling the voids with clay, and for a better look I completed the orbital (eyes). The actual eyes aren’t closed circles like a human skull. You can see the actual skull on the left side of the pic, and the fake eye socket on the right. The fake eye socket looks more skull like to me.

I have been scribbling some ideas for carousel creatures during the week so far.

Free Seo Tools

We spent all three days of our holiday working in the Garage Of Terror. I got a lot done but didn’t make much progress overall. We finished putting together the center column of the carousel only to find out two sad, sad truths. First is that plywood warps for no reason/any reason. Secondly I learned that I am a terrible engineer. (fun fact: my brother, father, and grandfather were all engineers and I learned nothing from them.) In the end it looked terrible and weighed about 150 lbs. Sigh. So I took it all apart, piece by piece and rebuilt it. It took all weekend. Now it is square and true, and weighs about 50lbs. I didn’t get to do anything fun. I was a grumpy Grinch by Monday.

Why so Grumpy? While I was unscrewing and cutting and rebuilding the carousel column, everyone else got started on their fun props. Fun props like these:

I was green with jealousy! I was also mad because my jaw mold i made and remade three times tore. Now it’s useless. I spent at least $100 in materials and three weeks or more building it right.

I’m glad I only have a 4 day work week! I can’t really rest until the major construction on the carousel is done. Then comes the fun part of building the monsters and their riders, the decorating and painting of the carousel.