Previously, on THINGAWEAK…

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.

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.

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.