Daily Archives: November 19, 2017

Project Zombie Dancing

I am beginning to think it takes the same amount of time to prep and complete these Halloween tutorial posts as it does to actually make the prop.  Feels like I have been typing for days and still have a number of props to get through from this year’s Haunted Trail of Tears event. If I can’t take the time to give thanks to those who gave me inspiration and give back to the haunt community, then I should just pack up my motors and find something else to spend all my free time on.  So, today’s featured decoration that made its debut on our Halloween trail this year is my dancing zombie.

Zombie Animatronics for Halloween 2017

Typical for first year props, there were some difficulties with this on the trail.  Due to an unforeseen design error, we had to turn this prop off about midway through the night.  I’ll explain more on that towards the end where I’ll give some recommendations on improving it for next year.  First off, I need to give a shout out to two haunters that helped inspire this project.  The first is SoulsOfTheForsaken.  He put up a tutorial on YouTube showing how they put their animated zombie together (link here).  This was the base for my idea.  Then thanks to another tutorial also put on YouTube, I was able to leverage a slightly different linkage system and still get the motion I wanted.  Again, thanks to Hawthorne Manor Haunted House for their rotating skeleton video (link here).

First task was to get the Hawthorn linkage working.  Rather than go through the huge amount of design and build hours it took to get to this point, here is the starting structure.  Note the use of the cross connectors  at the top.  I leveraged the bushings approach used in my other PVC animations to get a nice smooth circular motion on the cross bar.  The 3D printed bushings allow the smaller 3/4″ pipe to stay centered and move fluidly through the 1″ cross connectors.  Now just needed to connect a 1/2″ pipe at the center of the crossbar.  This provides a pivot point to move about while the vertical bar is rotated from the bottom in a circular direction thanks to the wiper motor at the base.  I did put a connector on the down pipe so I could easily get it on and off the wiper motor arm – you do not want a lot of play in that or it will slip off – a straight coupler would have been fine, but had the T connector laying around, so just used that.  Lastly, I put a 1″ pipe U structure above it with the intent of that keeping the cloths out the mechanism and kind of mimic shoulder structure.

Zombie Animatronics for Halloween 2017

Hit the jump to read about how this new Haunted Trail prop came to be!

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