Subterranean Drill Vehicle Project

Posted in Art, SteamPunk on December 7th, 2010 by Dr. Warthan
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UPDATE:  Project completed.  Giant drill penetrates man’s driveway.  Community shocked amused.  Halloween saved.  Dentists everywhere rejoice!  Good job Peter, we’re looking forward to next year.

11/1/2010 – We did it. It was probably the hardest project I’ve done yet, but with the help of a lot of very talented people, we pulled off an amazingly huge prop for Halloween last night. Here’s a shot from this morning to show what we built:  Amazingly, we built a bigger prop than the concept art showed. It’s massive. The drillbit alone is 11 1/2 feet long. From the tip of the drill to the base of the cylinder is about 25 feet. The tip reached very near the top of my two story house. There will be more photos and video over the next few weeks, but I just wanted to put this up to let everyone know we got the project done.

Most Halloweens are spent supervising young children as they muck about in their $5 plastic Darth Vader / Hannah Montana costumes collecting chocolate-coated razor blades balls of caffeinated sugar.  But not Peter Montgomery; oh Hell no.  The man has a serious Halloween hobby that makes your paltry 2-million Christmas light display dim by comparison.  This year’s theme is a Jules Verne-inspired Steampunk drill bursting out of his driveway.

“I’m calling the display “Journey from the Center of the Earth.”  It’s a giant, 18 foot tall, steampunk inspired earth drilling machine.”

If you watch the video below, you’ll see the man is a Halloween god.  And like any god, he needs money.  Pete needs to raise a mere $2,200.  At the time of this writing, he’s got $1,684 from 67 backers and 14-days to go (Oct. 14 deadline).  He’s using KickStarter (which uses Amazon payments) to fund his project.

I’ll be following up to see the real deal after Halloween.  While the animatronics Peter will no doubt provide is really cool, I fully expect a ride down the Well to Hell so that I can relish in the screams of all those Soviet Union souls condemned to burn in the lake of fire.