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I started with a regular plastic ice chest. I never would have gone out and bought one since this was more an experiment than a sure-thing. Fortunately my neighbor was throwing this one out as it belonged to her ex-boyfriend who never claimed it when he moved out (and the bottom was gunky as well). In short, perfect fodder for this kind of project. |
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Next you need a hole boring attachment as you might use for cutting a hole in a door to install a lock. |
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Cut one hole near the bottom of one end. This is where the chilled fog will exit so that it will stay close to the ground. |
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Here's a close-up of the hole and the
plug that came out of it.
Cut another hole up high on the opposite end. You'll see the two holes together a couple pictures down. |
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Now you need some wire screen. The variety I bought is somewhere between chicken wire and screen door mesh. As long as it holds ice up, you're good. This stuff stayed in whatever position I bent it, so that determined how I was going to hold it up. |
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After cutting a square so it fit snugly
across the ice chest, I cut a few more sections and curled them to serve
as pillars. This turns out to be a very sturdy arrangement.
As I promised above, you can also see the position of the two holes I cut through the sides. The higher-up one is offset only because I was avoiding the handle on that side. |
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Perch the fog machine high enough that it blows into the ice chest. As you can see here, there is a layer of ice across the mesh. You've figured it out already: The fog is injected through the top hole, goes over and through the ice layer before exiting the bottom hole and creating a spooky atmosphere for the Trick or Treaters. |
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The white and blue are anything but Halloween colors, so I added a layer of black, then followed that with some matte black spray paint to cover any hard-to-reach spots (i.e., in the grooves). |
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Test run. Not much ice in here, but it does the trick at keeping the fog low. |
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Here's the makeshift assembly on Halloween night: the fogger stacked on top of a container up against the back of the cooler. The whole thing is supposed to be "hidden" behind a gravestone. That really wasn't the case until it grew dark enough for the spotlights in front of the "stones" to cast a shadow in that direction. |
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Houston, we have a problem. The fog wasn't pushing through the ice very fast. I had loaded it up with a full bag of ice cubes, and that meant there was too much solid material blocking the path. I put a doormat over the whole thing, but to no avail. |
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Dani solved the problem completely with a few inches of aluminum foil to bridge the gap. This sealed it 100% (removing some of the ice helped as well). |
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Ta da! |
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Before long it was coming out pretty fast and staying low. Very, very awesome. Dani's the Baroness from GI Joe, just in case you weren't a boy in the '80s. |
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A nice shot of the fog. Unfortunately, periodic gusts of wind helped dissipate it and put it into the air, hence the picture is a bit hazy. |
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A good blanket of the stuff. |
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Ah, and here's a good idea for next year: Light effects! |
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The undead just love creepy low-lying fog. |
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Here it is on Halloween day in 2010 with
the fogger running through the cooler to get the low-lying fog.
That's the other member and a half of the Conehead family. |
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