Thread: guillotine

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Hey everyone!

I was wondering if anyone had seen (or built) a guillotine prop for their haunt. I have a few ideas on how to proceed, and such, but was interested if anyone else had done this yet?

One of our local haunted houses did one - it looked very cool (quick strobe of light while the actor slipped out/blade came down; when the lights came up the beheader held up the fake head and chased the group out with it. ) Quite fun.

Sounds like a hoot!

I was thinking of making a motorized one. Would like to build it so the blade is raised by (perhaps) a wiper motor, when it reaches the top, the blade is released. Once it comes down, the head (on a hinge) would "drop" into a basket. A few seconds later, the motor would again raise the blade, as it was going up, the head would return to the original position, to be ready for the next cycle.

check out this thread for ideas on how to do it:

Guillotine

I did have one but I made it too big and had to leave it outdoors which it warp. It was constantly exposed to the elements.. I broke it down but need to rebuild it. It consisted of two 2x6, four 2x4, and two 4x4" boards all in 8ft lengths with a single 24x48 piece of 1/2" plywood. I used a FLAT plastic flouresant light housing lens then cut to size & painted it silver for the blade(added red paint at the bottom). It was cheap to construct and did the job. Oh I also added a small pulley system with heavy grade(non-flouresant) fishing line attached to a swinging gate for my cemetary. They opened the gate and the blade dropped up and down. Cheesey but worked! Hope all goes to plans when building yours!