Halloween

It's almost Halloween and I wish I could show you the best Halloween build we ever did but there are no pictures of it and it was disassembled pretty much after that Halloween. We had a party one year and made a little haunted house on our back patio out of large sheets of black plastic that my dad got from his work. We lit it with a strobe light and had a fog machine as well. On the inside were your typical put your hand in the bowl type stuff but I wanted a coffin. My dad helped me put together a coffin with a false bottom. I would lay inside and I could lift the bottom up and the top open at the same time and sit up and scare people but when they lifted the lid the coffin was empty and they couldn't tell the bottom lifted up at all. I thought it was awesome but we didn't need a coffin laying around or have the space to store it afterwards, so we just used the boards for various other projects.  

I also remember another Halloween when my grandpa had given us a microphone and speaker system. I'm not sure if it was all assembled when we got it, but they were about the size of drive in theater speakers. My dad got the idea to stick a speaker in a dummy we made and then we could hide inside the house where we could see the kids through our kitchen window. We would wait until they said thank you or something then say you're welcome through the microphone. This was some pretty impressive stuff back then. We didn't really have this kind of stuff around unless you wanted to spend a bunch of money on it. It scared a ton of kids that year and we got a lot of fun out of it.

This year I only have a few decorations that my son wanted to put out and we carved a pumpkin but I'm sure as he gets older we'll come up with some equally fun Halloween builds. In the mean time my dad has been fixing my band saw. I was hoping I could just cut out the broken piece and replace it with the new piece but the new piece wasn't made for my exact saw and even though it fits, it still needed some fabrication. I bought a piece for a Powermatic band saw because that brand is pretty pricey and rightfully so. As I was hoping this meant the new piece I got was much stronger than the old one and with the new fabrication by my dad, it's not likely to break again. If I really misused it I could probably break it but it would probably be the remaining old part that breaks and not this new part. Because this has been such a wordy post I'll throw in a picture of the new piece. On the right you can see where the old piece broke and the bits of it left over after we cut it off of the rest of the part we needed to reuse.