Happy accidents

1637 Views 11 Replies 9 Participants Last post by Neuf350Z, Jun 7, 2015

OctoberDream

Discussion Starter · Jun 4, 2015

Happy accidents.

Have you ever had one?
Last night I did. I was starting a new prop out of 2” foam board and I was gluing them up to make a foam block. I cut the pieces out, sprayed them with water, add my gorilla glue, stacked them up on top of each other and put a couple of cinder blocks on them to hold the down. I then started to tinker around the shop. After about 15 min I went back to check on the block. To my horror I found that the top two pieces had slid half way off the stack. (I know, rookie mistake. It’s not like I have been doing this for 15 year, and know better.

) I tried to separate them, but it was too late. After about 3 min of full on cursing and screaming the spirit of Bob Ross came to me.

“There are no mistakes only happy accidents.” I immediately calmed down and started to think how to make this work. After about 10 min I had an idea, The two layer that got messed up were right at the same level as the eye socket. Now I have always had trouble with carving eyeball from foam. So I thought, if I had a ping pong ball as my eyeball it would look more realistic. But how to get it inside the foam before you start carving?
Then it hit me. I’ll use a router bit and bore out half the eye ball in one foam board and bore out half in the other, then glue them together. I tried it on a scrap piece and bingo it worked great.

So, now I am really pumped for this prop. And I owe it all to Bob Ross and his “Happy accidents”.

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Pumpkin5

· #2 · Jun 5, 2015

Yay for you! Way to take lemons and make lemonade. I'd love to see a picture of it. (I usually don't have happy accidents....I usually really muck it up if I mess something up, but maybe I don't give my mess time to evolve into what it was destined to be. Did I mention I have zero patience?)

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Trex

· #3 · Jun 5, 2015

Same, my screw ups are usually beyond salvage....so I am envious of your good fortune!

Post pics I would love to see the final project!

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jdubbya

· #4 · Jun 5, 2015

The one that stands out was one I thought for sure I'd absolutely hate, but it turned out even better than I thought. I was carving a foam tombstone and adding age cracks to it. I was using a small hand saw to take some foam off the side when my hand slipped and I put a big gouge in the foam. I won't repeat what I said right after it happened but there was no way I was going to scrap the stone so I figured a way to use the gouge to my advantage and just made it look like a large chunk of stone had broken away. It turned out nicely and to date is one of my favorite stones. You can see the gouge on the bottom left of the stone.

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Jerseyscare

· #5 · Jun 5, 2015

My fence. The uprights, PVC, slide over rebar, driven into the ground. However, trying to keep the fence straight and square, didn't work when I hit a large rock, I moved the rebar location, and slid the PVC over, thus the fence was no longer straight or square.....and looked creepier!!!
That's what is great about Halloween - nothing needs to be perfect! Which fits ALL of my skills.

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OctoberDream

Discussion Starter · #6 · Jun 5, 2015

I only got my idea to work on a scrap piece, but I should have some pics soon. I re-glued the foam board back together with the ping pong ball inside last night. Everything went together very well. This weekend I'm going to try to carve it out to see if it really works the way the scrap piece did.
If I am not able to post pics of the real prop by Monday I can at least post the pic of the scrap piece.

BTW I am loving the stories you guy have about your happy accidents. Keep them coming.

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wackychimp

· #7 · Jun 5, 2015

Jerseyscare said:
That's what is great about Halloween - nothing needs to be perfect! Which fits ALL of my skills.

Maybe that's why I love building stuff for Halloween. Most of my stuff looks wrong in some way... Nothing I do is ever perfect!

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OctoberDream

Discussion Starter · #8 · Jun 6, 2015

I finally had some time to upload some pics of my happy accident. Sorry, I did not take any pic of the block that slid off the stack and got stuck.

As promised above, here is the test pic made from scraps.

and here is the start of my new prop.

I just had time to block it out. I still have a long way to go. But you can see how the eye turned out. I am happy with it.

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Pumpkin5

· #9 · Jun 6, 2015

WOW! Very nice, that is going to be wicked cool. Happy, Happy, Happy.

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talkingcatblues

· #10 · Jun 6, 2015

That works! Looks great already.

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thenightmarefamily

· #11 · Jun 6, 2015

I sliced my thumb one year when carving a pumpkin and had to go get stitches, when i came home blood had squirted all over the pumpkin and looked really cool, so i left it that way.

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Neuf350Z

· #12 · Jun 7, 2015

Just had a happy accident. I was doing a wash on one of my new tombstones (some call it tea staining), and too much of it got on the stone. The first thing I had within reach was a Swiffer dust cloth to wipe up some of the excess. The fibers of the cloth were getting caught on the grit of the Drylok on the stone so at first I thought "Crap!" but then I actually liked the way the cloth distributed the wash. I ended up dunking it into my wash, squeezing out the excess and pressing it against the stone. In the end, the fibers that got caught look like cob webs.

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