How High would you go?

[Hell American Freak]

We are a temporary haunt, everything gets tore down at the end of the year and put back together again the next year... I really don't feel like lugging around 3/4" plywood for 2 months. The skin on our walls is only 1/8" thick, our house gets the snot beat out of it and we've never had a problem with durability. If you just put some simple frame work inside the walls it won't break when impacted.

I don't think your haunt gets beat enough. We use either one or two sheets of 1/2" plywood on one side of a full 2x4 fram with another 2x4 down the middle, and we still get people going straight through them. Granted, they are some huge guys, lol.

1/8" lauan is extremely flexible, when someone impacts one of our walls, if they don't break the whole 4' x 8' wall loose, they simply bounce off of it. An actor striking the wall with a prop like a pipe or a hammer is more likely to break through the wall then a customer, which does happen. Think of it like snow shoes, the smaller the footprint the more likely it is to break through. A customers entire body impacting the wall distributes the force over a larger area then a small blunt object, resulting in them simply bouncing off the walls. Besides, it's more fun to watch them bounce back then just hit it and stop... :P

[Jim Warfield]

If all your walls were 3/4 inch plywood, you could sell them for alot more money someday as lumber because they would still all be in pretty good condition, versus sickly Luan or dieseased osb.
Somebody could actually use them to build a real house, use them for flooring , roofing.....
So the investment would be not totally hosed like starting with the inferior cheaper products= junk.

[Hell American Freak]

Our flimsy Lauan walls, as you would say, are in their fifth year of use and NOT in any major need of repair despite the yearly beating they take... I don't think I need to worry about "wasting money" on "inferior" wood. I'll will trust our Owner's judgement who just so happens to be a Licensed Framer...

[Jim Warfield]

The customer abuse one's walls must take does depend alot in the customers you have and the haunt's style of scaring.
Cramming more bodies/per/hour through a place also makes for more abuse to the walls and other vandalistic problems.
I once bought 25 very cheap , hollow core doors for 25cents each, these were covered with what must have been 1/16th inch panels, yet after three or four years only one or two of them had been kicked in.
Of course these flimsey doors were heavilly triangulated as installed, but most of them were used as two-sided walls.

[Hell American Freak]

We can sit a here and pick at eachothers descriptions of our houses until we're blue in the face. We are in different areas with different demographics of customers. What works for me here may not work for you. Our establishment takes just as much if not more of a beating then all of the other permanent attractions around us. We've had the best and worst in customers and abuse trown at us for numerous years, thus far our establishment has survived to laugh at it.