My son Alex and I spent the past two evenings working out the bugs on some new Halloween Fog Machine hacks for his graveyard. We tested many viewer tips from the last blog video and some configurations of our own. We came up with a whopper of a Bazooka looking Spooky Halloween Fog Machine.  In the video we first give a build description of the final working fog bazooka and then show it in action in our Halloween graveyard. The first 7 minutes have the good stuff and the rest of the video is just clips of all the iterations we tried that didn’t work quite as well as the final bazooka design.

Update 2/10/2014 – A reader also recommended using better fog fluid: American DJ Fog Fluid or Chauvet.

This is super easy to build and works GREAT! I have to thank the viewers for such great ideas.

Alex starts off the video by reminding kids to “stay in school!”. Ha

This hack did work with just normal ice only as well as dry ice only but worked best with a 50/50 mix of ice and dry ice. The below 5 gallon bucket is 50/50 ice and dry ice. I picked up 15 lbs of dry ice at our local Fry’s food store. Each 5 lb block is about $5 and last a long time. I used all 15 lbs at once with about an equal amount of normal ice mixed well and filled to about 1 inch below the in/out pipe holes when the bucket is upside down. You don’t have to use a 5 gallon bucket but something that fills to about this level with this amount of ice and dry ice. Once you put on the lid let it set for 10 minutes while the dry ice and ice mix and get the inside real cool!

This turned out to be the best configuration. It kind of reminded Alex of a bazooka so we named it a Bazooka Halloween Fog Machine. We had started with the bucket right-side-up and the fog machine and pipe at the bottom but the ice just blocked the holes so we flipped it and it started working GREAT! So you don’t want the ice to be locking the holes.

Below is a dark photo of the graveyard with the spooky Halloween fog we can now create. (Click the photo for a hi-res version).

Front view with some lighting.  (Click the photo for a hi-res version).

I used a 3 inch whole saw to cut two holes.

You could stop there but we wanted to try pipes so I put in two shower drains we got at Home Depot. The shower screen does seem to provide some back pressure and resistance but I don’t think this is too critical. Having the out pipe is critical and made a big difference. It seemed to help keep the fog in the bucket longer so it cools longer before finding its way out the 2 foot 2 inch exit pipe. The shower drain adapters made connecting the 2 inch pipe easy but duct tape and a large hose should work. You don’t need to drill the holes in the bottom so I taped them up on our final design.

This last photo is just to show that the fog machine on its own will only create hot fast raising fog that doesn’t have that spooky Halloween look that Alex wanted for his graveyard.

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