Skinning the Skull Pumpkin

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 is, try to work in long strokes. If you start go in little bitty pieces, you'll end up with these round kind 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 sort of stripes in a pumpkin work. Just grind it, grind it, grind it down, grind it, grind it, 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, 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.