Hot to Make a Toxic Drum - My Haunted House.US

How To Make a Toxic Drum

Below you will find instruction on how to make a Toxic Drum. A Toxic Drum can be expensive to make, but adds to the spooky feeling.

There are several styles of drums that you can buy. Most of us are used to the metal drums that we have seen in the movies for years. Metal drums can be very expensive and are very heavy to move around. Another expensive type of drums, are the new plastic drums that are replacing the metal drums. What I used was fiber drums. They are made of heavy fiber board with metal top and bottom rims. The barrels are light and easy to move. The advantage you get with the drums, that you can store your Halloween stuff in the drums for next year.

I started by painting the outside with an exterior grade paint. This sealed the fiber board so that it wouldn’t disintegrate in the rain. I painted it with two full coats. I used white as a base to help the other colors stand out.

I used painters tape to break the barrels into thirds.

Painting the barrels with different colors helped make them stand out. You can use many different colors to start with. Then you can follow up with aging if you like.

I went online to find warning signs for different materials. By printing these symbols on to pages that I could glue to the drums. Plus I made a stencil of the symbol for biohazard and sprayed the symbol unto the drums (you can see the symbol much better in the next photo). If you look close at the red drum you will see that I have drilled holes in the side. Using the fiber drum makes it much easier to drill all the holes than any of the other much harder drums.

When you look at this photo you can see that I have filled in the holes with lights. I used LED lights because of their longer life and low maintenance. Because of this I should not have to worry about replacing any light bulbs for many years.

Inside the drum I used painters tape to place the lights through the holes I had drilled in the side of the barrel. I use several strings of lights for each of the barrels. Each string was 50 lights, and I used 4 to 5 strings per barrel. Most of these lights were strings left over from Christmas specials. The cost was four dollars each. For my preference I used red lights on the drums that I put radiation warnings, and the biohazard got blue and green lights.

In this photo you can see that I have added some cardboard at the bottom of the barrel. I have taped some of the lights to the cardboard.

Now I have covered all lights with expanding foam from a can. When you drill your holes in the side of the barrel think about how you want it to look in this instance I wanted the barrel to look like it was leaking around the rim of the drum. The spray foam will give you a look of bubbling material. With the lights underneath it becomes eerie when you look at it. At night you’ll be able to see it from a distance.

Here’s another view of the blue drum before foam. On the grounds I put another sheet of cardboard down and attached some lights to it, which I plan to put foam on to.

I’ve taken red paint to the foam to give it some highlights and shadows.

Here is a photo of the drums during the day. I put them far back to make it look like they had been dumped from a truck when they started to leak.

I took this photo at night so you could get a close-up look at the drums, and see how the lights glow through the foam.

Here is a corner shot of my Halloween scene.

The cost for the drums with tax was $40. The lights cost me about $40 and $10 for the foam in the can. Paint costs me $10. Total cost for the two drums in their finished form was a bout $100. Plus you get the advantage of using them for storage for next year.

October 3, 2010

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