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Pale Night Productions is a company born out of necessity.  We have spent years in the haunting industry designing, fabricating, and operating haunted attractions and have seen first-hand the poor quality and outrageous pricing that many other haunt manufacturers provide to their customers.  PNP guarantees that every product we make is of the highest quality and at the most affordable price.

Other companies brag about their employees being trained special effects technicians, but that only provides you with props that look good on the surface.  Other manufacturers claim that their products are "engineered" to the highest standards, but you won't find mention of them actually employing engineers.  PNP employs actual industrial, manufacturing, and mechanical engineers who specialize in robotics, automation, design, and fabrication.  When we say we engineer fear we really mean it.  Additionally, our engineering staff are skilled special effects technicians and we all have years of experience in the haunting industry.  We are meticulous when it come to detail and we only build props that are practical, reliable, and affordable.

Okay, so we can talk all day about what it actually means to employ degree-holding engineers.  We can go on and on about the quality of our products.  But what good are words with nothing to back them up?  Here are a few examples of where we stand head and shoulders above our competition.

WARNING:

The following information may be hazardous to our competition.

Welds vs. Bolts

Few people in the industry truly understand the difference between welds and bolts when it comes to proper application.  Most have been led to believe that welds are strong and that's the way to go.  This is, unfortunately, a common misconception.  While welds do offer strength in some situations, they are not meant for every application.  For instance, welds are NOT meant to be loaded in bending which is a loading that nearly every armature you can put in an animatronic will see in service.  In general terms, welds are not the strongest way to connect two pieces of metal due to the limited nature of the loads they can carry.  Just look at a bridge the next time you drive over one and ask yourself why all the connections on it are bolted and not welded.  Welds are also subject to various types of defects, many of which are not detectable to the naked eye.  Several examples are shown at the right.  Finally, welds require trained technicians and special equipment to fix when they break.  If a bolt happens to break, anyone with a ratchet can replace it in minutes.

The real reason that welds are so prevalent in the haunt industry is that they are fast and cheap.  We here at PNP are not in the business of slapping products together as fast as we can and our pricing shows that even though we use bolted connections, which are typically more expensive to implement, we still sell for less than our competition. 

Pins vs. Bearings

When it comes to hinged joints, many times what you will find in haunt props are two pieces of metal with a bolt or pin holding them together.  This creates metal-on-metal contact which wears on every piece of the hinge and results in poor performance as well as a joint that will destroy itself over time.  PNP uses bearings on every load-bearing joint.  In other words, if the joint will be seeing any kind of significant force a bearing is used.  Not only does this greatly improve the performance of our props, but it drastically improves the life of every joint in the prop.  All of our products are built to provide you with reliable operation time after time after time.

Calculation and Analysis

Being engineers, we pride ourselves on doing work right the first time.  When we set out to build a prop, we know it will work BEFORE we put it together.  Every conceptual design we produce goes through several stages of calculations and analyses before any parts are ordered or assembled.  We do not simply use parts that are available to us or guess about what we think might work.  Through our method of design, all components are properly sized meaning no surprises when we assemble them.  You will never find a spring-assisted cylinder on any or our products.  Spring-assistance is a sign of poor design.  It indicates that the cylinder was not sized to do the job so a spring had to be used to help it.  Not only does this indicate a poor conceptual design, but it also provides it's own set of problems that will ultimately lead to the failure of the mechanism.  We employ the latest and most advanced techniques, like Finite Element Analysis pictured at right, to ensure that every product functions properly and dependably.

Pneumatic Control

Most companies simply produce a product without any way of controlling the airflow.  This is inherently dangerous not only to the prop but to you and your patrons as well.  If the prop is only meant to operate on 50psi and you supply it with 100psi it could be a recipe for disaster.  We provide pressure regulators with built in pressure gages standard on every prop that requires them and we even set them to the proper pressure for you.  This alone doesn't set us apart, however.  There are some companies that provide the regulators with their products too.  The feature that you will find with us that you won't find with other companies is flow control.  It is a misconception that by changing the pressure supplied to an air cylinder you can change the speed of the mechanism's movement.  What you are actually doing when you change the pressure is changing the force that the cylinder can exert.  This will, at times, change the speed of operation, but it is not the proper way to do it and it can lead to other problems which are often solved by things like spring-assistance.  We don't stop with pressure regulation because we know better.  All of our props that require speed control are fitted with flow control valves that actually control the speed at which air  can enter the cylinder.  This directly changes the speed of operation without affecting the amount of force the cylinder can produce.  Not only is this more effective, but it is THE correct way to alter cylinder speed.  As an added bonus, nearly every flow control valve we use is equipped with a muffler that dampens the annoying "whoosh" sound that pneumatic solenoids make when they fire.

Control Hardware and Software

The prop that you buy is really only as good as the control hardware / software that runs it.  We use only the best controllers on all of our props.  For our larger, multi-motion props we employ programmable logic controllers or PLC's.  PLC's are actually designed for industrial control applications so you can count on their reliability in almost any environment or setting.  We can even custom make our props with a certain kind of control hardware that you are more comfortable with or simply with no control hardware at all if you'd like to take care of control yourself.  At Pale Night Productions we want to provide you with exactly what you want.

The Little Things

It is our goal to provide you with the best possible product we can.  We design with the intention of thinking about every possible problem and fixing them before they occur.  We use lock nuts with nylon inserts on every bolt that may possibly come loose in operation.  This eliminates the need for repair men to periodically retighten the bolts.  When we design a product that will see a harsh environment, we choose parts that will stand up to the wear and tear it is going to see in operation.  Galvanized or zinc plated steel is often used in these situations to resist rust and corrosion.  All of our mechanisms are designed to be hidden at all times.  We do take the precaution, however, of painting every piece of the linkage with flat black paint to help mask it from sight.  Lastly, don't forget that the selling price of every triggerable prop includes a 6in. by 23in. pressure mat.  All of this coupled with our commitment to you and your satisfaction even after the purchase is made put Pale Night Productions on the forefront of the haunting industry.

Please, give us a try.

You won't be disappointed.