Hearse progress

I cut some drainage pipe for the corners of the box and started working on the carriage. I laid the wheels up to it to see how it is going to look.

I Built a simple model of the hearse to give me some idea of the size and demensions.

Casting

We have been working on a project for a while to cast the front half on one of the Big Skulls we bought for several new mud men we are working on.

We covered the skull in rubber and created a plaster mold for it. We have now started casting some skulls.

We covered the jaw in dragon skin and poured a jaw but it was too expaned. We got some figerglass resin and have created a hard cover for the mold to keep it from expanding.

The Hearse

We cut out wheels out of 2" pink foam last week and Mr. Reid and worked hard at shaping them. They look pretty good.

I spent some time working on the back cabinet for the Hearse. It has a 1/4" plywood base that will be covered in 1" pink foam.

Another FFNW picture

Someone took this picture at FFNW of our graveyard setup with the ghost running on Friday night. Looks pretty good.

You can see the person that was walking around as a blur because of the long exposure. Kinda cool!

FFNW Day 4 the drive home

We dragged ourselves out of bed at way to an early hour after staying up so late the night before. Quin arrived and we rented the U-haul and drove to Champoeg park. We got there about 10:30am. We get busy packing up and were out of the park by Noon.

The door prizes were given out before we arrived. But I am sure that everyone got some great stuff since I knew what some of the stuff was.

We got home and unloaded. Again thanks to Quin for all his help. We took showers and crashed on the couch. I woke up and decided to enter some of these blogs while I could still remember what all we did.

FFNW Day 3

Our alarms go off and we fly out of bed rushing to get ready to leave so we could get there on time. We even went shopping at Safeway the night before so we were ready. It was like the scene out of Four Weddings and a Funeral (bugger, bugger, bugger). But we got there just a bit after 10am. I think Jen was amazed to see us.

We poured some expanding foam and carved and painted some tombstones for a couple of hours. Grant from Canada joined in and did a tombstone for us. It was hot and we were constantly trying to find the shade.

We found ourselves at the Pirate bar quite often. We talked to people all day and had a great time.

Of course there was the Costume ball. The Pope and Elvis came by to visit the Graveyard. We moved our video projection to the bust that we placed on the Mort and the Barons tombstone for the party.

We stayed up with the Pirates until about 12:30am but we finally had to get home so we could get up and rent the truck for the next day to load up and go home. Jen on the other hand stayed and was the life of the Party...or so we hear?

FFNW Day 2

Our plan was to do some stuff around the house and go to the store and then pack the Pickup and leave by Noon. We didn't leave until 2pm and then we were stuck in I-5 traffic and didn't show up till almost 4pm. Poor Jen was starving and worried about where we were. The good thing was we were able to update her via cell from the road.


Once we got there we hurried to get the rest of the display setup. I wanted to get the LED lights working and we had a our big sign and directional sign to setup.

Vern pulled us aside in the afternoon and asked since weed pulling duty was canceled on Saturday if we would mind having people over to our area to see some of the work we planned on doing. Which meant we had to get to the park by 10am.





That night we had the ghost running in the Crypt and even had a guest dressed in a white brides outfit with blood all over her. We created a mood for the scares of the Geo-cachers. Larry even wore a Reacher outfit that cared the daylights out of a bunch of people.








We went home about 11:30pm planning on getting up early Saturday so we could get back to demonstate stuff.

The Start of FFNW

Chris drove down early to Champoeg park to meet Vern and Sue and drop off our "stuff". She came back home around 1am. We rented the U-Haul and loaded up the truck with our stuff. Thanks to Tony and Quin for helping me out. We were able to get everything we thought we would need in the littlest truck.

After we got unloaded Quin drove the truck back to Portland. Tony stuck around and helped us setup next to "Monkey Island'. Tim and I were having a bit of a race to see who could get setup first. It wasn't really fair since there were 3 of us and only him doing his stuff (oh, Mort was directing).

Once Jen finally showed up we set up her tent and headed home that night. Our plan was to bring some more stuff back with us on Friday including food for the day.

We cut out 16 blank tombstones this weekend. We carved about 14 of them. We are taking them down to FFNW to paint and detail while we are down there.

I also poured some accents from some molds we borrowed from Tony. We were going to give some away at FFNW and use some on our tombstones.

I also corpsed a couple of Mr. Thrifty skeletons (33") and set them in my little coffins. I plan on making a cage for one of them to bring with us to FFNW.

Secret Garden Tour over

We had another successful secret garden tour for the Ardenwald Elementery school.

We had visitors all day on Saturday. We set out some tombstones in the grass and put Calvin and Hobes up so people knew who we were.

After it was over we all gathered at the New's house for pizza a wine. We drew the raffle prizes and unwound. Then, at 8pm, we went over to the Muddy Rudder to see Joe New play. It was a long day but we had a good time.

Halloween stuff

I built a couple of coffins for the smallest skeleton they call Mr. Thrifty. The first one was out of 1x3's but was too bulky and heavy. The second one I did today was out of lath slats. It looks a lot better and is very lightweight.

Not sure what they are for yet. Probably just decoration or maybe to sell?

I bet you can't figure out what this mess is? It is all the components for a new effect we are doing this year. It is based on the programable controller from EFX-TEK. The other components include a sound module, 16 port extender, Audio Relay switch and a 12VDC solenoid.

Here is what will happen.

1. A bit of video will be displayed with an audio trigger towards the end of the video

2. The sound relay will trigger when the audio is heard on the video

3. The controller that is in a wait state for a trigger will start it's program which does the following:

a. Play a footstep sound 12 times

b. Play a footsetp sound and light a UV light (which will iluminated glowing footsteps)

c. Trigger a solenoid 10 times rapidly

4. The controller will go back to waiting for a trigger again.

5. The video will have a build in delay before it loops back again.

I just need to mount the components and create the permenent wiring. The program is already written and everything has been tested individually now I just need to hook it all up and make sure it works.

I have been working on doing an animated skull this year. I have experimented with several different ideas on how to do the mechanics but just can't settle on the right one yet. I do like the nylon ball I am using to pivit the head. It moves very smothly.

I like the way I did the hinged jaw it works really good.

I am still playing with how the head is going to be moved. I am toying with a cable system right now but it is too soon to tell if it will work.

I am also working on a small mud guy lamp. Another decoration or something to sell?

Getting ready for the Secret Garden Tour

We spent the past few weekends getting ready for the Garden Tour on Saturday the 30th. They moved it back this year from mid May to June 30th. We thought that would give us plenty of time but we are still scrambling to get things done.

We did a brick and mortor edging around the mulberry tree to hold in the gravel we did last year. We took out that awful plastic edging.

We bought a new fountain for the vegetable garden area. Last weekend I dug up the beds and we brought a yard of compost in to cover the beds.

This weekend we got a 1/2 yard of pea gravel and redid the flower garden paths and the vegetable garden beds area.

Chris did a lot of weeding and planting and moving of stuff.

Of course we can't have an event if halloween isn't somehow present. Chris put some of the half concrete skulls in the gravel under the mulberry tree.

Halloween Progress

Things are moving slow in the halloween department. We have a lot of smaller projects this year and a few more technical ones.

I have been spending my time working on a new automated special effect using some prop controlers and other assorted electronics. It is going slow but I almost have it completed.

I have been doing a lot of research on how we are going to do the animated talking skeleton that will be sitting on our hearse this year. I think I finally decided on a method and there is a lot of support on the web with examples of how other people did it. Now I have to actually get started on it.

We have several new video projection projects. Some of them are just revamping the ones we did last year but we are also going to and 2 new ones. One of them is part of the automated special effect I metioned earlier. The other is going to replace the mechanical ghost in the shop window.

I am also going to be improving the grave digger just a bit this year and moving him to a new spot.

The Secret Garden Tour which we are in again this year was moved from mid May to June 30th. This has caused our halloween progress to slow while we prepare for this event. We are also attending Fright Fest Northwest this year and bringing a lot of our display. FFNW is July 13-15. We will also have to prepare for that too. So we really won't be in full swing with halloween until almost the end of July. This is a much smaller timeframe than we are used to but with the lack of big projects and the smaller ones we should be able to get everything done we are planning...