It is said that no one is an island. I think nowhere is that more true than with the Halloween community. People are always looking at what others have done, and expanding on their work, or flat out copying it. It’s kind of expected I think. We are not immune to this either, heck the whole cauldron creep idea came from someone else on the internet.
In order to have a cauldron creep at all, we needed a frame for the body. I did some looking and found a nice tutorial by Mr Jingles. (https://mrjingleshalloweenhaunts.wordpress.com/how-to-pages/how-to-cauldron-creep/) and decided that it would be a good starting point. Using his measurements and parts list for the frame for his cauldron creep we knocked out a basic frame for our project in a couple of hours one June evening. (June 20th if you really want to know)
For our needs the basic frame from Mr Jingles was a good starting point, and it did a pretty good job overall. We opted to not use PVC pipe for the arms and instead used the arms from our sacrificial skeleton. The arms had to be taken apart, and modified with a Dremel and a few other tools to make a space to insert a 1/2″ PVC elbow at the head of the humorous bone. Once the cavity was able to hold the PVC elbow I taped over the end of the elbow that would live inside the arm and filled the whole area with J-B Weld 8281 Professional Size Steel Reinforced Epoxy. This allowed us to attach the arms, position them as needed, and even remove them from the body while we worked on the rest of the creep.
After painting part of the frame black using a PVC friendly black paint I also modified the upper leg bones of the skeleton to fit over top of the PVC. These modified bones also ended up getting some JB weld to hold them together. The lower portions of the leg bones, and the feet were attached to the base of the frame using some of the screws that were removed when the legs and arms were disassembled. Recycling at its best!
We tend to get high winds a few days every year and I had concerns about the durability of the 1/2″ PVC. The lower legs were positioned in a way to make a triangle and secured tightly enough that they act as additional bracing for the vertical segments.
We also plan to drive steel rebar along side the vertical segments and attach to them for added strength.
Once things were assembled I filled in any gaps and holes with more JB weld. Once that cured I painted over the dark grey JB weld and all of the remaining exposed screws with paint I had custom mixed at Menards. You would not believe the weird looks you get from the paint counter when you hand them a chunk of a plastic skeleton leg and ask them to color match it.
– John