Halloween Props: This Drill Makes Your Head Spin

[Nollie551] sent us a demonstration of his head spinning yard prop. Adding a possessed child as part of your Halloween display is a nice touch. But when her head starts to spin (think: The Exorcist) as trick-or-treaters saunter by it should scare the life out of them. You can see that all it took is a jig to hold an inexpensive power drill in place. He didn’t include details of how this is hooked up but we think it would be a great way to use that drill switch hack that [Ben Krasnow] did a while back.

Join us after the break for some video.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xLFJK0Uj68]

9 thoughts on “Halloween Props: This Drill Makes Your Head Spin

  1. I don’t think this counts as a “hack” yet…it’s really just carpentry! If he included a system to make the head react to people walking by, or jitter the motor speed like that spider from a week ago, then we’d be talking ;)

  2. @Christopher Mitchell — hey now, I didn’t say it was *nice* carpentry. Those are some ugly-ass joints. It’s just not a “hack” in the spirit of this site is all.

    Though it does get you thinking about how you could improve it to make it fit better here. How about putting a webcam in the eyes and hooking it up to a laptop running openCV, so that the head spins around and around until it sees a person then locks onto them and follows them around the room?

    Really, there’s just so much more that could be done here…

  3. Good job on the project and all that to Nollie. It might not live up to some peoples expectations, but if he is happy with it, more power to him.

    On the other hand, the spinning head has, in my opinion, always been the lamest “scary” effect. I thought Exorcist was going along really well, until the head spin. An impossibly gaping jaw would be scarier. Like a snake dislocating its jaws or something. I dunno, but spinning heads just doesn’t cut it for me.

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