Experience Mayhem 2024

Every year, our garage is taken over for the sake of making peoples Halloween experience more delightful. This year we decided to go all out by using new tech, and learning pneumatics all with the goal of making an experience for people to remember. Experience Mayhem 2024 consisted of a 3x3ft room that filled past your hips with ball pit balls. People were greeted by our Disco DJ Skelebones as he instructed the guests what to do. People were jam packed in this room filling with balls, the wall was pushed in and as an electrical surge went off. To finish everything off, 25 pounds of pressure was unleashed as the finishing touch!

When we looked for a new controller, we definitely were looking for something that could be easily tweaked. This lead us to the Flex 2 Show Controller. This new controller allowed for us to easily fix things like sound or how long a piston is open for.

Speaking of air pressure, this year we used 4 different solenoids to make the entire experience flow perfectly. One piston was used to drop the ball pit balls into the room, one for them to leave the room, one to push the walls in on the guests, and one to blast 25 PSI on the guests as a last hurrah!

Another scare that was added was the use of an electronic firecracker. This thing was charged with 110 volts that sparked and zapped all throughout the night.

A late addition to this years experience, but definitely brought things together. This room was equipped with a custom soundtrack, fake bugs, real bugs, and a creepy actor. Lights would flicker in this room as our actor showed the guests our cockroaches and even left some of them in their trick or treat bags to-go.

Our Disco DJ who would be talking to our guests throughout their experiences who was fully equipped with a microphone, headset, and super rad hair! This character was also the voice in the room the whole night!

A piston screwed into a beam in our garage ceiling that would pull up an mdf board wall that held the balls inside of the upper chamber. As the door lifted, we found that having someone on a ladder flushing out all of the ball pit balls allowed for the room to be filled to max-ball-pit-ball occupancy.

This Piston would release the ball pit balls into a pit behind the whole experience. The people who helped work the experience would broom the ball out of the room and use home-depot buckets to recycle them back up to the top.

The final pneumatic piston that was a final addition to add a cherry onto this claustrophobic room. It would shrink the top of the room to about a foot small than it was before. This late addition to the experience ended up being one of the peoples favorite part.

As the walls closed in, an electrical surge could be heard followed by one big blast of air. This was accomplished with an electronic firecracker and 5 gallon air tank that would dump 25 PSI on ours guests ankles.

When the idea of building a 3 x 3 ft ball pit inside our garage for trick or treaters came about, it definitely could not have gotten to where it did without the help of everyone who chipped in.

We also used this experience as a way to raise money for a family who has been affected by Cancer. The proceeds that were donated will went strait towards helping this family.