Oak Lane Cemetery

06/17/2026

I think it's the little details that can make or break how a prop looks. Things like this. I used a hot knife to bend the fingers and fingertips to that they look like they are gripping the tombstone instead of just laying flat on it. Little things can make all the difference in the world.

06/17/2026

Pallets aren't just for haunting! I use them for making planter boxes for the garden. Just finished up this one for her lettuce and herbs. Is it square? no. Is it nice and smooth? Not even close. But it only cost me the price of a few screws and nails to make. Plus the cost of 2 8ft 4in trim boards ($7) for the top so there wouldn't be any splinters there. So probably about $10 max to make.

Right now she has some leftover "extra" plants sitting on the shelves. They were getting cooked sitting on the patio and she wants to save them. This spot gets dappled shade until around 3 or 4, then direct sunlight till around 7 or 8 so they should do fine here until her lettuce and herbs start growing in the buckets.

06/17/2026

Despite the hot weather and lack of rain, our little garden has been doing great so far this season! We already have loads of grape tomatoes and spoon tomatoes getting ripe and the mortgage lifter tomatoes are starting to get big. The green beans and luffas are climbing up the trellis now along with the spoon tomatoes and should cover them in a few more weeks. Our two little pots of strawberries are overflowing with new growth. The peppers are struggling a little this year, along with the squash and melons but we hope they will perk up more once we start getting more regular rain. We did a lot of bucket planting this year and I used pallets to make boxes to hold the buckets and help shield them from the sun. We have lettuce and herbs in those. My little barrel pond is doing awesome, but the plants around it are having a hard time with the summer heat.

06/16/2026

I found a small piece of 1/16 steel plate that was big enough to go under the front part of the tombstone rocker's base. It stiffened the front up just enough to eliminate most of the flexing and quiet the creaking significantly. Not a perfect solution, but it works and was pretty easy to do. I still get some flex in the pipes between the front and back halves that I might be able to stop with some rebar inserted into the pipes. Hindsight being 20/20 the base for this need to be made from metal, not pvc. I'll make do with what I have built, but I would advise anyone else to make their base from threaded pipe, or weld up a proper frame for it.

06/16/2026

Anybody priced 2in foam sheets lately? Lowe's inPG Virginia. Yikes! Glad I still have my stockpile of salvaged foam!

06/16/2026

Went to move the Tombstone Rocker back into the workshop this morning and discovered something interesting. When I moved it, the animation started working correctly again. It would seem that this prop is EXTREMELY sensitive to being level. Much in the way that cauldron creeps have to balance the stick to run smooth, this guy has to balance the weight of the tombstone. It runs perfect on my workbench or the cement floor of my shop, but once on grass it tends to get wonky and that causes the animation to get weird. Glad to know it's not motor drift, but it might be a pain in the ass to find a good level spot in the yard for it and I might have to tinker with it a lot to keep it running.

06/16/2026

Didn't do any actual work towards finishing this thing up today, but I did find time to have some fun with it. The base hid PERFECTLY with just some handfuls of grass clippings sprinkled over it! I set up a little experiment to see how it would look with grass hiding the motor and mechanism using some half dead potted plants. Unfortunately by the time it got dark the motor drift happened again and the good pushing motion turned into more of a leaning on the tombstone action. Back to the drawing board on finding an animation that will work with the drift. :(

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06/15/2026

The Pumpkin King just departed for his new home at Red Vein Haunted House! Looking forward to visiting him at his new home this fall!

https://www.facebook.com/RedVeinHaunt

06/15/2026

Skelly Crow looks totally stoked about the new blooms in our garden.

06/14/2026

I sat down and reprogrammed the animation today. I'm pretty happy with this one. This is the full 41 seconds of animation, viewed from 2 different angles.
So far this animation has held for 4 hours of testing. Hopefully I've got the motor drift issue at least greatly reduced by making the park position dead bottom, and making sure the motor does at least two complete revolutions to help hide the drift if it does happen.
During my rest runs I noticed that the line to the head would snag on something every once and a while. I traced it to the guide wire being just a hair too short and sometimes snagging the spring. I remade it with thicker wire and made it about 1/4in longer. I suspect the spring stretching very slightly caused the issue.