The Magical Pumpkin Machine

There is a legend that haunts the halls of 2025 Washington Avenue, the legend of a man and a machine with diabolical designs of gutting a thousand pumpkins this Halloween.

Rich Denisar’s pumpkin carving machine, turned a few heads and raised a few eyebrows during its design and construction at NextFab’s 2025 Washington Avenue location. The machine with its modified hand drills, water hoses and chains looks like a prop from a horror film. Is this the work of a sinister madman? Far from it, Denisar’s passion isn’t really pulverizing pumpkins, but rather bringing the kids in his neighborhood and community together.

After having built his impressive “neo-Victorian” home in Mount Holly, NJ, Denisar noticed that the neighborhood kids bypassed his house on their Halloween trick-or-treating rounds. Determined to make a better impression on the youngsters, he devised pumpkin carving contest. Twenty bucks and 10 pumpkins later, he’d broken the ice and was on his way to establishing a local tradition. After a few years interest grew and more an more kids came by his house. 2016 is the 13th year that Denisar is hosting the Mount Holly Pumpkin Festival and he expects to purchase in excess of 1,000 pumpkins.

The chore in pumpkin carving is cleaning the pumpkin out, removing the seeds and slimy innards. This prompted Denisar to build his machine. The machine holds the pumpkin in place with an orange metal cap that holds an inner tube. The inner tube places pressure on the top of the pumpkin as it gets worked over on the machine. The first stage is a hole saw that bores a hole in the bottom of the pumpkin, the machine then rotates the pumpkin to another cleaning station with a tool that begins the cleaning. A water jet keeps the tool clean and rinses the pumpkin out. There are six stages in all, each with a finer tool for cleaning. One stage will remove only seeds, which will then drop into a chute to fill a bucket – a thousand pumpkins means a lot of seeds! The machine is run by an Arduino interface that controls a stepper motor for rotation and the engagement of the tools. Tool speed is carefully controlled to optimize efficacy without shredding the pumpkin to pulp.

The Mount Holly Pumpkin Festival will take place between October 24th and 30th and is completely free to attend. Rich Denisar and his wife Deanna fund the even themselves but accept donation via their GoFundMe account.

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