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