A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

Halloween — the four bar simulator looks like the most useful toy.

EKI - Product Information – recommended by a couple people. Might be underpowered tho — the specs say 250W per channel for a total of 1000W, that may not be enough for my lightning effects.

Note for next year’s halloween — you can build a really simple coffin thumper by talking an old electric drill and attaching an armature to the end which will whack against your coffin wall. wire the trigger closed, attach to a dimmer, and place in a coffin or box. if i had a drill lying around today i’d try it.

Tonight’s Halloween lesson.  If you apply 60 PSI to a steel cylinder with a cross section of ~7 square inches, with the intent of opening and closing a coffin; and if you build the coffin out of cheap-ass plywood with wood glue and light screws and with some soft pine fittings to anchor the cylinder at either end, what happens? Well basically your coffin explodes. 

Tonight’s excercise was coffin plan B — reconstruct coffin, have the pneumatic cylinder push off ground at one end and against the coffin lid at the other end, allowing that end to float freely against the lid.

Oh this was on top of my lesson sunday night which was “What happens if you apply 120v AC to a 24v DC solenoid valve?” Well the solenoid works for a little while…then it magically isn’t a solenoid any more. Good thing my solenoid valves came in a gang package of 7 — two to burn out, one to break a fitting in, leaving 4 that actually work!

Tried to fire up all my halloween props last night. Lots of setup errors — the lightning strobe fired when i turned on my tombstone uplights; the tombstone uplights lit when I tried to fire the doghouse fog machine; the doghouse fog machine didn’t ever fire.


After much head scratching I determined that I had some bit errors in the DIP switches controlling DMX settings on the various devices. The doghouse address was off by 2 suggesting that the 2nd switch is shorted, and i never could get the strobe to respond to any programmed address so i turned all the switches off and it responds to its default address, 1. Not surprising that the gear is suffering from 4 years of wet fall weather here. I may need to replace a few items next year.


As of this moment tho, all lighting and effects are functioning — tombstone uplights; haunted tree; several banks of lightning effect lights and strobes; my four fog systems; and my two solenoids for animating my casket.


Also did a lot of pneumatic debugging today. My exploding cauldron is working nicely; my coffin animation is working. I had to take down my air cannon tho — it was WAY too powerful for my intended effect, I would have been driving everyone out of the yard. I need to rethink its use for next year.

I’m a bit delayed in testing all my setup since we had 5″ of rain in one day on Monday. Yesterday was a lot clearer tho and I tested my whole yard fog system for the first time this season. Normal amount of leaks, got those all fixed, and it worked great! Filled my yard, the street, and the neighbor’s yard. Cars stopping, neighbor came over to chat, definitely this is always a highlight of our haunting. With blue filters put on all our yard lights, this fog alone creates a very eerie feeling.