Inspired by the first few seconds of this video, and intended to take advantage of the ever-growing “Miniature Pet Shark” trend, I built this prototype for my friend Alice’s shark Bitey. Bitey has been known to frenzy at the drop of a meat-hat, and woe be to the face that gets in his way. On an unrelated note, if you just want to see the important part of that linked video over and over and over again you may do so here: http://chum.kazco.org/ GO GO GO!

Step 1:

Buy one of these confetti guns from Kroger:

Something I’ve just noticed is that apparently one of the later steps is going to be “Lose most of the pictures you took of the intermediate steps.” Consequently, MY next step is to make up some bullshit steps based on what I have left. Your results, of course, may vary.

In the interim, please enjoy these adorable photos of our vicious spokes-predator:

Back again? Excellent, glad to hear it! If you’re just joining us, then you’ve started reading at the wrong bit, why not head up here first, hmm?

For the rest of you, you’ll be happy to learn that I was able to find all the missing images! Any passing resemblance my photos may have to Google Image Search results for step numbers is purely coincidental.

No toolbox should be without a set of "traffic signal" pliers

Step 2:

Grasp the head of the firing pin firmly with your smallest pair of Needle Nose Traffic Signal Pliers. Now, slide the pin carefully into the receiving orifice on the top of the seventh heaviest pearl onion in a standard 8oz. jar. If you do it properly, the onion will crystallize and take on a blue tint. If you do it wrong, well, finishing this tutorial will be the least of your problems.

Cut It

Step 3:

Now, take the sanctified blade from before and SLICE THAT FUCKING DOILEY. This is important to release the doiley from the oversized and pointless watermark with which it is burdened.  Dispose of the (now defiled) blade in a Portal To Hell.  If a Portal To Hell is unavailable in your reality, then the dumpster behind a Waffle House will also work.

Step 4:

Angel Fingers.  Strap them on tightly, because you sure as hell don’t want them coming loose and allowing blood to flow back into your fingertips.  I know it seems counter-intuitive,  but you’re just going to have to trust me on this.  Once you have your very own Chum Cannon Jr., you won’t even miss those fingers.

Step 5:

OK, so if you’ve been following along at home, then you’ve removed the cylinder from the confetti gun and the confetti from the chambers of the cylinder.  Now it’s time to repack the cylinders with delicious fish guts.  It is possible that, through no fault of your own, the US Postal service has personally forbidden you from mailing innards of any sort, and has even assured you that they are monitoring your outgoing mail.  If this is the case, you may wish to use some form of “fake” guts like the ones pictured on the left.

With all chambers loaded, you can now reassemble the gun and get to the part I’ve already done for you!

	Front Hi-Res JPG (209K)
	Back Hi-Res JPG (139K)
	Label Hi-Res JPG (37K)
	All bits in a PDF (1.2M)

AND NOW, The Stunning Conclusion to Mega-Spooky Doom-Skull of Inappropriate Nudity, just in time for Halloween:

OK, so at this point you should have a pair of eyes but nowhere to stick em, and nothing to stick em with.  Ain’t that always the fuckin’ way?  Well if you started this project without a skull to put the eyes into, and just figured I’d show you how to Magickck one out of raw firmament…  you’re right!

Go to your kitchen and get a big knife, a plastic grocery bag, a lighter, and some flammable liquid. If you have one of those motorized turkey carvers grab that too).  Now go downtown and find a hobo.  Be very careful when sneaking up on it, each strand of a hobo’s hair is actually a tiny eye stalk, so the ones with the wildest hair can see in many directions at once.  The first thing to do upon initiating your attack is to SEPARATE THE HOBO FROM ITS BINDLE AND BURN THE BINDLE.  I cannot stress this enough.  An average bindle contains anywhere from 200-300 Hobo Eggs, any of which is fully capable of turning you into a shambling incubator with an unquenchable thirst for Thunderbird.

Bindle taken care of?  Good!  The hobo is almost certainly circling you with its jaw distended and its rows of fangs glistening with ichor.  Within moments it will begin shrieking a summons to its unholy kin, so now is the time to act!

Thrust the knife repeatedly at an upward angle in between the plates of its thorax until the Hobo has stopped moving.  Now detach its head however you see fit and scuttle on home.  There are plenty of flesh-stripping / bone bleaching tutorials out there on the internet, so I feel no need to explain that bit to you.  Point is, you now have a skull.  If you’d planned ahead just a little, you’d have picked a plastic one up from your local discount store last Halloween, but there’s no point in crying over spilled hobo.  Seriously.  They wouldn’t cry for you even if they had the appropriate glands to do so, don’t trouble yourself overmuch.  ONWARD.  Depending on the kind of skull you’ve acquired, you’ll need different tools to get inside.  The end result should be removing the top-rear quadrant of the skull and clearing out the eye-sockets (assuming this is not done already) as pictured.

From this point onward, I’ll assume you’re using some sort of plastic skull for the sake of simplicity.  So, how are you going to attach your eyes to the slick inner surface of the skull?  As I alluded earlier, you’re going to use a pair of bolt/nut combos to simulate bearings, and Epoxy Putty (available in the adhesives section of your hardware store).  This part is hard to describe, so I made a pretty picture to help.

If you get what's going on in this pic, go ahead and skip the rambling description to the left.

It is also up to you how you build the ‘sticky-out bit with the nut in.’  I cobbled mine together out of crap I had lying around.  From the picture, it looks like I welded a nut onto a joint piece from some Helping Hands, and that seems plausible enough.  The only important bits are that the threading in the nut is not damaged at all, and that the sticky-out bit (hereafter SOB) is long enough to hold the eyeball out with minimal rubbing against the eye sockets.  Get the bolts that match the nuts on your SOBs, and superglue them head-down into the tops of your eyeballs.  use another nut outside the eye to strengthen the hold.  Once you’ve screwed the bolted eyes into your SOBs you’re ready for PHASE WHATEVER:  Attaching the Eyes.  Slice off a chunk of epoxy putty, knead it up, roll it into a ball, and squash it just over the inside of the eye socket.  Try and restrain yourself from pounding it flat with your grubby meat-hooks, we need enough depth to hold the SOB in place once the putty dries.  NOW,  jam the non-eyeball end of the SOB into the putty and position it so that the eyeball looks out of the socket, and hold that pose for a few minutes until you don’t need to anymore.  You should do each eye as that shit dries fast.

You may need to glue the dried epoxy putty to the inside of the skull if you weren’t clever enough to roughen the surface first, or maybe you’re just thorough. What do I know?   OK, so here’s how mine looked at this point:

So now you have to articulate them.  Well, if you’re not a cheapass,  you can just use a hobby servo and it’s associated controller.  Seriously, though, fuck that noise.  Grab one of those old CD-ROM drives that seem to accumulate around your basement like locusts and put it to good use.

it's the part with the gears

Strip out the geared write-head assembly and sorta glue it haphazardly to the inside top of the skull.  Those little fuckers have got some decent torque, will run just fine off the 3V output of your RC receiver, and are conveniently pre-mounted on slabs of metal.

For the assembly to control both eyes at once, any sort of lightweight sticks will do. I used plastic coffee stirrers.  I glued one to the top of each eyeball (pointing backward, dipshit) and joined them to the “linking armature” with thumb tacks.

If you were less zealous than I, then you may not have destroyed  the handy built-in rail mechanism that converts the motor output from rotational to lateral motion by hacking it out with an angle grinder.  If this is the case, then you could probably work out some means to attach the eye-armature to the rail bit and save yourself some time.  If, however, you took the more violent and satisfying option as I did, then you’ll need some sort of cam.

I hacked this out of one of those blue plastic electrical box covers that I love so very much and glued it to the center of the armature, then I poked a tiny machine screw through the most accessible gear and into the cam slot thing.  The good part about using the coffee stirrer / thumbtack method of armature construction is that you can mess around with the placement of the bits until you get the travel length you want.  Oh yeah, you’re gonna have to wire it up, too, but you should be able to figure that out.  If not, then post something and I’ll write an addendum.

I’m out of words now. Go away.

Holy shit, is it Halloween already? Well I guess I’d better go ahead and post about this thing I just finished, the mega-spooky doom-skull of Inappropriate Nudity! OK it really has very little to do with nudity, and I may have finished it just a bit before the most recently passed iteration of Halloween, but you know how it is. Don’t you? You’d better, by God.

Old Eyes, New container

The idea here was to take that disembodied ping-pong ball eye thing I made Back in The Day, and embody it with a plastic skull for maximum spookiness. Now that I think about it, you really can’t get much more inappropriately nude than bare bone, so my original statement stands. Now if you’ll just follow me through this jump…

… And here we go!

Although I did not actually measure any of this shit, you totally should.

Although it should be patently obvious how (if not precisely why) one would go about this, I feel a spell of didactic wankery coming on. First, take a moment to ponder what a pterodidactyl would teach. Now you/I/we drill holes though a pair of ping pong balls. I made the pupil holes just large enough for a 5mm LED to fit into them. Ping pong balls are 40mm in diameter. Now you’ll also need a hole in the top for the eye to pivot on, but you can drill that later once you’ve scrounged up some bolts.  Meanwhile, back to the pupil. Each eyeball will need a 5mm LED that can run comfortable in the 1.5-3V range, a short bit of flexible 2-conductor wire (cheap speaker wire works pretty well),

The assembled eye will probably look something like this

Now, wire up your LED, shrink-wrap or liquid tape up the leads, and poke it through the back of the eyeball so that it sticks out the front. Apply super glue liberally, then fit the gem over the front of the LED. Take a can of Great Stuff or equivalent expanding foam insulation, and squirt it into the ping pong ball to keep the wires from jiggling around.

A problem you’re going to find is that the amperage put out by your average radio controlled car is some mighty weak damn sauce.  It’ll light your LED, but it sure won’t give anybody terror-wood.  TO THE CRAFT STORE.  (Don’t worry about losing Testosterone Points points for shopping at a craft store; as long as you fill your pockets with PBR and baby back ribs beforehand you should be fine).  In the craft store, go to the “Shiny Things You can Use With A Glue Gun To Make Your Clothes Look Terrible” aisle, and pick up a package of little flat red plastic gems.  No I don’t remember what size.  Pupil size, OK?  So drill through two of them with your 5mm drill bit and stick them over your LEDs somehow.

Would you just look at how badass that pissant little LED looks with the power of Craft Store Gem backing it up?

OK, now that you’ve done this thing I said twice, you have 2 lovely eyeball things which you may paint white if you don’t wish to advertise SPORTCRAFT for some reason.  Cute, but how the fuck are they going to pivot inside that irregularly shaped skull?  I guess if you wanted to be all fancy pants you could go and find some tiny bearings and have a lovely tea party with them and your dollies, but if you’re the sort of person who goes around  using the “right” tool for the job you probably wouldn’t be reading this.  Anyway, I like nuts and bolts better.  Yes, I just said I like nuts, and while I’m sure that you too will love my nuts, you really need to stop being so juvenile.  Anyway, the goal will be to jam some machine screws up through the hole in the top of each eyeball and attach them to some metal bits embedded in epoxy putty.  As the metal bits in question will have the matching nuts attached to them, and the epoxy putty will also be stuck to the inside of the skull, your end result is a pair of really cheap bearings that also move up and down slightly as they turn.  What?  It’s a damn feature OK?

Fuck it this is taking forever I’ll do the rest next week.  I Christen this the END OF PART ONE

The Science Musical is coming to your city, if your city is Atlanta Georgia.  If it isn’t, well then I guess I lied.  Try not to let your mascara run all over the tattered remains of your belief that the Internet is a medium for Truth.  Anyway, The thing that the last several things have been props for will be performed:

This Sunday, November 16 2008 at Relapse Theatre on or around 7:30PM

That’s right SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY! YOU WON’T HAVE TO PAY FOR ANY PART OF A SEAT, WHICH IS GOOD BECAUSE YOU’LL ONLY REALLY BE USING THE EEEEEEDGE.

Where?

Relapse Theatre on 14th Street, (380 14th Street N.W., Atlanta, GA 30318)

Y?

Because I Gotta.

How Much?
Free!  It’s only half an hour for Science sake

Oh hey and here’s a teaser image of one of our cast members in a pose which appears nowhere in the musical, as well as another teaser image taken at our Alchemy performance wherein it is clear that much science is happening.

Ghini took this pic; thanks Ghini!

Man would ya look at all that fuckin' science going on!?

It turns out that, along with being ugly and generally disagreeable, Kaz is quite lazy, and has enlisted me to write up his latest thing this weak week.  Being a friendly and helpful sort, I asked for a lucrative long-term contract, but apparently you have to be in a blogospherical writer’s guild or something?  I don’t know.  Whatever the reason, I’m not being paid, so you’ll just have to deal.  On with the show!

This weak’s thing is a little different, as it is reportedly a “prop” for a “show” of some sort.  I think it looks more like set dressing, but what the hell do I know, I’m not an artsy-fartsy type.  Also, I wasn’t there for the construction, so I’m looking at these pictures with the same incredulous, slightly fearful and unfamiliar eyes as you.  (Not literally)

	Okay, we start out with a big emergency stretcher for someone REAAALLLY fat.  I mean huge.  Looks like a big PVC frame with canvas stretched over it.  He probably bonded all the joints with PVC glue like a big nerd, too, even though it’s not carrying any water and needs no structural integrity.  Way to build things to last, Kaz! Dork!  I guess we should just be thankful he didn’t try to weld it.  Do you have any idea how hard it would be to write something up for a melted glob of erstwhile PVC tubing and canvas sheet flambé?  I’d probably just link you to a youtube video of a Great White concert and call it a day.
	Then apparently he sponge painted that crap.  WELCOME TO THE EARLY 90s, HERE IS YOUR NIRVANA CD AND FLANNEL SHIRT, ENJOY YOUR STAY.  Christ.
	And then, let’s see, he stenciled “THE MACHINE” on it in big letters.  VERY DESCRIPTIVE, DOCTOR NERDENSTEIN.  Bonus point: this picture is out of order! When did he do the stencil? WHO KNOWS! Look, it’s not like you want to make one of these for yourself, so let’s just try and get through this, ok?
	For the embellishments (other than the quite apt name stenciled on the front), we only have a couple.  The first begins life as an innocent Virgin Mary clock.  What did it ever do to you Kaz?  Apparently helping people by being an inspiring timepiece is grounds for Kaz to pull your hands off and cover you in paint.
	Then once you expire he’ll weld a spoon handle (what is it with him and spoons?) to a bolt and shove that in the middle of you.
	This is just gruesome.  It looks like he drilled a few holes and inserted a few machine screws into the border, possibly to make it more science-y.  Who knows why he does anything, really? (You may also notice that it is labeled with the measure “1.21 Jiggawatts”.  I know, I know, everybody remembers that.  Don’t tell Kaz.  He thinks it’s really clever and obscure.  Trust me, okay?  Hey, do you want to end up with a spot-welded chimera jammed in your solar plexus?  Thought not.)
	Moving on from The Little Chronograph of Horrors, we come to, and I quote, a “big fuckoff switch”.  Kaz evidently bought out the local plumbing supply’s stock of 1″ PVC, because that’s what this looks like too.  Then he covered it with what looks like rustoleum, despite the fact that PVC doesn’t really rust.  I’ve tried telling him that not everything rusts but he just kind of cocks his head to the side like a dog, or maybe Gary Coleman.  It would be adorable if he didn’t just proceed to cover everything with a thick layer of spray paint immediately following. In any case, it’s supposed to look like one of those big knife switches, and it sort of does, I guess.  Close enough for some nerd play, anyway.  His hinge looks like, uh, a bracket with a screw through it?  Très high tech.  Attach that to a strip of wood, then glue some paired neodymium magnets to that and another strip for affixing it to your canvas sheet, and you’re nearly done!  Thank God.
	So here it is, assembled.  Underwhelming, no?  I suppose we’ll just have to see it in context, which, if I’m not mistaken, is a “science-themed musical” performed at your local intersection of nerd and hippie culture.  Sounds like an absolute HOOT.  Be sure to wear your tie-dyed periodic table t-shirt! I need a drink.

Most of my allotted “project time” is going towards the science-themed musical I’m helping to throw together for Alchemy this year, but I was able to finally finish this Robot House sign, which I’ve been working on since we moved into Robot House 1.0 many years ago.  I didn’t document any of it, so comment or email if you can’t figure out what some of the pieces are and it’s really bugging you for some reason.

Yes “BigKaz,” you’ll be happy to know that I “Still need all that stuff.” This silly website gets over 4 hits a day! Not Including me! Besides, I’m sure you have a good couple of years left in you, whomever you may be.

Anyway, on to the stuff. 2 whole things this week, although maybe “whole” is a bit grandiose. I think it’s fairly clear that I haven’t taken this much time between postings to concentrate on quality.

Thing #1 HAM HOLES DOT COM The Glorious and Long-Awaited Launch of HamHoles.com! I suppose I never really took the life-lesson of “not spending money on idiotic things” to heart. How else to explain my purchase of yet another domain name? I suppose I could say I was just doing my part to block a potentially very creepy porn site from gaining a toehold on the internet, but that’s just silly. No, actually it’s the future platform for a daring new performance art piece where I dig a hole in your yard, fill it with pork, then charge you $20,000 after my friend Alice breaks your soul with impressive art terminology. Yes, in fact we can perform at birthday parties.

Thing #2 A fake book for landfill embeleshment applications cut out some cardboard coat one side of the cardboard with spray glue cover the glue side of the cardboard with cheap cloth assemble some styrofoam into the shape of a books guts spraypaint a strip of paper as wide as the styrofoam and as long as 3 sides (you can skip this step if you can cut styrofoam accurately glue the strip to the foam, then glue the foam in the book Close it all up with lots more glue Smirk with pride, knowing you’ve just spit into the face of the ancient and venerable art of bookbinding.