~ Devil's Boiling Cauldron (easy Special Effects)

Tired of the same old, lame, glow in the dark stickers and plastic spiders glued on the porch walls for Halloween? Let's make a Devil's Cauldron that bubbles and glows and pumps out misty spooky kid scary fun fog on their special night.

It has to be EASY

It has to be SAFE

It has to work and look GREAT

So, keeping all the above in mind, have a look at the short video and see what we made...

Easy---

1. hike out to the dollar store and buy a couple of skeleton arms/hands/bones and a black plastic cauldron (about 40cm diam.)
2. buy a mist maker from Amazon ( I got this one because it lights up and has 3 heads for lots of mist Mxmoonant 3 Head Ultrasonic Mist Maker LED Pond Fogger
3. Small skull mask, buy from dollar store or DIY, (I modified a 3d print model from Zet23t on thingiverse, thank you) using Autodesk Tinkercad, so it prints better with glow in the dark PLA with no supports needed. Edited .STL File attached if you want to do it that way.
4. Some wire and a piece of clear plastic ( I used the cut out side of a PET juice bottle)
5. tools = glue gun, scissors and a pair of pliers (optional 3d printer)

Simply drop the pond fogger into the cauldron, arrange the bones as you like, fill with water to about 4cm below the rim and plug it in... I told you it was EASY.

And SAFE. the fog/mist that this makes is cold and so is the water in the cauldron and it works on low voltage so no little ones can get burned or shocked, (some of them wanted to, and did, touch the creeping fog). That's why I opted for the ultrasonic mister instead of a fog machine which uses a mixture of glycol and glycerin that it heats up to boiling temps and pushes out as an oily smog. Those do make a lot of creeping fog, but I certainly didn't want little kids anywhere near enough to touch that thing and breathing that stuff is way out of bounds.

You can stop here if you like. The mister has a few rows of LED's that cycle through spooky colours to make the fog effect perfect for Halloween, but, there is a slight problem. The mister spits a lot of water drops out of the cauldron so we can do better and fix that in the next step.

So, we need a simple splash guard that looks great, stops the splashing and lets the fog crawl out underneath it. You could go back to the dollar store and just buy a skull mask or even use a margarine tub if you want, but where's the fun in that.

My solution was to download a skull mask model from thingiverse and modify it with Autodesk Tinkercad so it was sized correctly and printed without supports using some glow in the dark PLA filament that I had left over from another project.

Then I just cut out and glued a clear piece of PETG on the back side of the mask to cover up the eye and nose holes and glued 3 pieces of wire onto the underside of the mask. When you slide the wires down beside the mister head, which sits inside the float included when you buy it, the mask stands about 8cm above the head and blocks virtually all the splashing perfectly. Now you are done!!!

The effect is that the skull is floating on a mist of bubbling Devil's stew heated by a magic fire underneath.

The glow in the dark plastic shines with an eerie light as the mister cycles through its' coloured LED display and the mist crawls out from underneath and spills out of the cauldron in a delightful way. The kids loved it, (some were hesitant to come near it for a while), their parents loved it, I loved it and I also printed 4 more skull masks and taped them to my entry way solar lights so the kids have to walk by lighted skulls on their way up to the porch.

I've tried a lot of Halloween decorations and this is by far the best I've ever had... I can't wait to set it up again next year. Enjoy