The stocks double as a place for one of my buckies to be in my torture scene as well as a photo op site.  The empty side of the stocks will be for ToTs to pose for photos with the talking bucky.

Stocks

Spider Scene:

• Finish Spider Egg Sacs
• Build one new webbed up victim

Torture Scene:

• Build a Rack
• Build a Wheel
• Build a Chair
• Build Stocks

Misc Stuff:

• Repair the Skeletal Organist’s mechanism
• Assess older props and repair as needed

The Chair

Today I’m moving on to making the stocks.  This will be a photo op piece with a bucky in one side of the stocks and an empty set of holes for trick or treaters to pose in on the other side.

Spider Scene:

• Finish Spider Egg Sacs
• Build one new webbed up victim

Torture Scene:

• Build a Rack
• Build a Wheel
• Build a Chair
• Build Stocks

Misc Stuff:

• Repair the Skeletal Organist’s mechanism
• Assess older props and repair as needed

I also set up a prop… a Budget Bart shackled to the back of my house.  He’s been there the past 2 years in a pirate theme, but this year since the back deck is being changed to a torture scene, he will not be donning his pirate garb.

Here is what I’ve accomplished so far from “the list” detailed earlier:

Spider Scene:

• Finish Spider Egg Sacs
• Build one new webbed up victim

Torture Scene:

• Build a Rack
• Build a Wheel
• Build a Chair
• Build Stocks

Misc Stuff:

• Repair the Skeletal Organist’s mechanism
• Assess older props and repair as needed

Tomorrow I’ll probably start tackling the chair prop for the torture scene.  I think I’m right on schedule which is a wonderful thing.

Go check it out!

I bought some Iron Pipe and flange fittings, screwed one flange to the wheel, the other flange to the ground and ran a 36″ pipe between them thus suspending the wheel 36″ off the ground.

To that I tied a Mr. Thrifty with his limbs running in odd angles around the spokes.  Have a look.

What a way to die...

That’s one down.

I have a to-do list of things to finish up by the end of September so I can start the set up process in October.

Here is what I really  need to finish by October 1st:

Spider Scene:

• Finish Spider Egg Sacs
• Build one new webbed up victim

Torture Scene:

• Build a Rack
• Build a Wheel
• Build a Chair
• Build Stocks

Misc Stuff:

• Repair the Skeletal Organist’s mechanism
• Assess older props and repair as needed

That’s what I need to get done to ensure the plans I have for this year are implemented.  I may do other stuff in addition to the aforementioned, but that will all be considered a bonus.

I have spent some time this week working on some Spider Egg Sacs to help better flesh out the spider area of the walkthrough.  I have a build process I’m pretty happy with so I will be documenting it for the first new how-to I’ve done in about 3 years!

Here is the end result of what I did… it involves a balloon wrapped in cheesecloth and applying great stuff foam over the cheesecloth.  Two coats of foam was enough to make the structure rigid.  Basecoat of black paint, dry brushed on progressively lighter layers of brown paint and then wrapped it in common store-bought spider webbing.  Spray on some flat clear coat and it’s done!

I will be gluing on a bunch of small black plastic spiders to complete it.

Spider Egg Sac

Also, I am almost done re-painting those two tombstones from the last update.  I will be putting the finishing touches on that tomorrow.

Beyond those two things, I’ll probably start building the items I need for this year’s talking skeleton idea.  I’m not spilling the beans on this one yet as I think it is sort of original as well as comical and hope to not see it copied until I’ve done it myself.  I’ll probably show it off closer to Halloween. 

First task for the weekend was to rehab the toe-pincher coffin I built last year.  I had built it based on ScareFX’s plans and I had rushed through the process.  The coffin was used last year but it was extremely flimsy so I had to be careful with it when moving it around.  To remedy this, I re-framed the inside of it and used Gorilla Glue at all the joints to help make it more durable.  Task: Complete!

The second task this weekend is to work on the 3-Axis Skull some more.  I had found out this past week I had the servo linkages improperly aligned which caused the head to move in a less-than-optimal fashion.  This evening I re-aligned them and tested it out with Pololu’s Maestro Software.

Now that the servos are aligned properly, I need to get them working with the Pololu Micro Maestro controller via Brookshire Software’s VSA program.  As of this writing, I have not been able to get the software to talk to the controller properly.  Thanks to some help on HauntForum (from some more experienced than I) it would seem that my problem may be that I do not have the baud rate set correctly on the controller.  I will be trying that tomorrow some time and see if I can start programming the show once I get it running correctly.  Task: In-process…

The last item for the weekend is to re-paint my Romanian tombstone.  I originally built it back in 2005 and I have never liked the paint job I did on it.  I will be re-doing the paint tomorrow using a style similar to what I recently used to re-paint the obelisk earlier this month.

When I first built the Obelisk in 2006, the paint job was just a bland, ordinary gray.  This time, I modeled it after an obelisk in Pembroke center that was painted white at some point in time and the paint had been worn away by weather from the top-down over the years.

Here is the progress I made this weekend with the last picture being the end result: