Where did you get your stove?
I bought an unused stove from a secondhand shop

How did you make the stove explode?
I gutted the stove and put a door on the back so we could access it to put the melted figurines and some smoke into it. There is a movie clip of the shooting scene on my website: click here
you can see that the stove was positioned to sit in the fireplace so we could access it from backstage. When he shoots it there is a fake panel on each side that is pulled back by a crew person behind the fireplace, this exposes the scorched hole in each side. The only problem was the people with the seats facing the middle of the stove didn't see the sides. I added some metal trim that acted as a track that the sliding panel moved in. In the movie you can see the panel move a bit after the shot is fired. This was the first time we tried it and the crew didn't have the timing right yet.

Stove with fake panel in place, it is spray painted illustration board	Stove with fake panel removed, before painted distressing
Back of stove with guts removed and door installed

Where did you get your shot gun?
I was very lucky to have a friend that loaned us his double barrel shotgun. A blank firing shotgun shell is way too loud for most theatres so I had an insert made that was the same size as a shotgun shell, but had a hole to insert a 32 blank instead, see picture below. The problem with the gun is he has to open it and remove the shells so it has to be a working gun. You can get a firing prop shotgun that does not open or a non-firing one that does open, but to get both actions we went with a real shotgun. It might also be possible to switch prop guns, so 2 are used for the different actions. This was the biggest problem in this prop nightmare. The inserts were made at a machine shop for $25 each. Would have done it myself if we had a metal lathe in the shop.

Where did you get your saints?
We bought a number of plastic saints of various sizes and I made rubber molds of them and then cast a bunch of them in plaster and then a lot of people painted them. A huge amount of work.

How did you deal with breaking them every night?
He just broke them and we hot glued back together the ones that could be saved and put a few new ones in when needed.

Where did you get Taytos?
I think they were bought online. This one you can do the work for yourself.

If you use any of my solutions, please give me a program credit. Thanks, J. Michael Griggs