Halloween

I've stocked up a small amount of "family fireworks" for Halloween here in Canada. If you don't know, here in Vancouver. B.C. Canada pretty much one week before Halloween you are allowed to purchase "Family Fireworks" (Consumer fireworks in a way, dumbed-down weak fireworks/firecrackers)

You can ONLY fire your firecrackers/fireworks on Sept 24th, on your own private property or with permission form the fire marshal (Weird huh?) Regardless since the sales of fireworks is on during the week people disregard the "Sept 24th only" rule and you can usually hear a couple distant booms and crackling once in a while.


Anyway, the point of this blog post: as the more perceptive of you have realized, I am going as a SWAT "guy" or what-not this Halloween. This of course actually brought up a considerable amount of work to be done, I will cover most of the things I already did and have to do in the next couple of days.

More after the break.

My 'lil stash.

The left picture, my tiny little stash of feeble firecrackers. (Click images for original size!) Anyway let's move onto my costume. Going as some military tactical force, you need some head-protection right? Hell yeah, and here it is: my Kevlar helmet. After that you also need other things such as a balaclava, which I do have from my previous ski-trip. And what's cooler than a "SWAT" guy than a SWAT guy with a gask mask? I think you know the answer to that, and I present to you my panorama full face respirator.                                                                               
                                     

My Kevlar  Helmet.

You can see that I've got a pair of glasses in there! The respirator had "glasses-hooks" so I took a ol' pair of specs I had and threw them in there. Now the trouble is that a gask mask is cool and all but you need a giant filter sticking out of that thing to really impress the ladies, and here comes out dilemma. The respirator DID come with a filter, a new VERY NICE filter which expires in 2022. Yeah that's right, the filter will be effective for another decade; and since its vacumm-sealed it's going possibly even last longer than that. (The chemical fighting/blocking agents might not work as well past expiration, but particle filtering is the same.)

9/2023 One decade of domestic preparedness!

Formatting in this blog with pictures is just hell, this paragraph took some time to "stick" properly. 

Anyway moving on, since I couldn't use my real filter (It would be a waste.) I decided to make a fake one! Not only would that mean I could keep my real filter for actual emergency / other purposes; it also meant that I could breathe easier. (Because breathing through a filter is a bit harder than without one.)
I guess the colours of the fake gask mask is a bit steampunk... but oh well.

The picture to the left, its just two ordinary plastic containers, two sour cream containers to be exact. You can see a tiny blue part, the unpainted part of a small cup-like plastic thingy, the "shaking-cup" from Yahtzee!

And the bottle part covered in duct tape is the top of a barbecue bottle, threads covered in duct tape because the size was not very exact. And to add, you can see that the filter-lids have radiation shaped intake holes. I just taped toilet paper with duct tape onto the lids to simulate a filter.

Anyway that's all the time we have for today, I think I might upload a video of me in my costume... perhaps not. But until tmrws (Or a future post, just in case I don't post tomorrow! ;)

Here's the full resolution image of the shotgun shells I made as well. I just took plain white, clear, plastic film canisters and painted them gold-ish / bronze-ish on the bottom and topped off the main part with a bright red finish.

It's kinda cool, I think I may keep these afterwards, SHOTGUN SHELL containers for various thing!

See you tomorrow  everybody!