Tom Nardone: Hi! I'm Tom from ExtremePumpkins.com. We're carving a skull pumpkin
here, and we've got some details of the face going. Now we're going to
make a high holy mess, this is going to be unbelievable. It's going to send
pumpkin everywhere. So this is definitely an outdoor activity. I'm going to
use this angle grinder to send pumpkin guts into the atmosphere like
you've never seen before. I'm going to be scraping off the skin of this
entire pumpkin leaving behind a whitish grainy sort of substance that's
inside the pumpkin. So let's get it going. Put on your safety glasses, get
your angle grinder and you can see I've got a towel here that's covering up
all my tools, so they don't end up coated.
So as you can see, this takes off the skin pretty easily. I'm using just a
regular grinding wheel, it doesn't have any special thing, you can use the
sanding wheel, almost anything to take pumpkin skin off. I'm just giving it
enough of an angle that I'm keeping the wheel attached to the skin. You
don't have to dig into like this, just a nice run across it, and you can see
from my tablecloth, that it's just throwing pumpkin goop everywhere. So
again, be careful, be in a place like, you don't want to do this inside your
house anywhere, even inside your garage, definitely an outdoor activity.
So I'm going to keep grinding and we've got a lot of material to take off.
As I carve, you get to see a couple of things start emerging here. Look at
all these great veins and things that are inside this pumpkin, really gives it
kind of a neat and creepy texture.
Also, when we light this pumpkin from inside, you'll see a lot of that vein
come through, they really look good on your porch on Halloween night.
So again, we're just peeling off the skin and we're going to start to add to
the skull shape by taking some material off the sides. That will give this is
the cranium up here a little bigger appearance. So I'll keep going. So I just
turn the pumpkin around and you're probably wondering, why? I turned
the pumpkin around because my grinder tends to throw the guts that way.
So, if I work in this side of the pumpkin, I throw it all down at the table. If
I start working over here, I'm throwing it up at the ceiling and making a
giant mess.
Another tip I'm going to offer you are, try to work in long strokes. If you
start go in little bitty pieces, you'll end up with these round kinds of half-
moon marks in your pumpkin. It doesn't really look natural, so just go top
to bottom sort of along the way that the natural sorts of stripes in a
pumpkin work. Just grind it, grind it, grind it down, grind it, grind it, and
grind it down. It's getting pretty close, so let's wipe, and wipe him off, I
think, it's a hem.
Helps to stop once in while, take a look, and see what you've got to do,
kind of think it through. No need to rush through the step, I mean, you're
doing a lot of work here, taking a lot of gunk off of it. So I've got a lot of
skin back here. So I'm going to work on that for a little bit. This is not
really very skull-like area; people don't have a big divot on top of their
head. So I'm just going to try to take all the skin off and make it look
maybe a little bit more round.
I've got three safety tips for you when you're grinding out a pumpkin. Tip
one, don't touch this, this is a spinning grinding wheel; it grinds things
away, like your fingertips. So don't mess with it. Don't keep anything near;
don't get it near your clothes, just the pumpkin. When you put it down,
make sure it's stopped. I have a little block of wood here. I can stop it on,
before I set it down. If you set it down on a tablecloth, you can turn into a
big mess, so be careful with that thing.
Safety tip number two, wear and use your safety glasses. It's real tempting
to look out the bottom of them, but no, they're there to be between your
eye and the flying gunk. So make sure you're looking right through the
lens at what you're doing, not down out of the bottom, right through that
lens. Third thing is, this thing is flinging pumpkin guts, don't fling them at
anyone else. Don't spray them at your friends, don't have a good time. Just
make sure they're sprayed down in their controlled fashion, pay attention
to where they're going. So those three tips make the whole skin grinding
process go a lot better. In our next clip, we're going to keep working on
this skull pumpkin. Pretty soon, it's going to be really cool.