I thought I'd post some picture of two custom Skuttles I did for the Skuttle show at One-up last summer. The first is Ika-Skuttle...it was my first custom: It's painted on the inside with GID paint, which unfortunately shows every un-evenness of the transparent paint: The second is Electro. This won runner-up prize in the show: And a Quicktime movie of Electro in operation: http://www.asente.com/kr/Skuttle.mov
I already got a couple questions on how I did Electro. It wasn't too difficult, just took time and a little work with a soldering iron. I bought the supplies here: http://www.coolneon.com/ It uses their electroluminescent wire and super-bright LEDs (color-changing, and solid green for the eyes). The LEDs were wired up in parallel. I soldered wires to the LED leads and wrapped the joints in heat-shrink tubing. The most difficult part was getting the eyes positioned where I wanted them in a way that would keep them in position as I reassembled everything...I ended up using a short piece of coat-hanger wire, taped the wires to it, and taped the whole thing to the back of the neck. One important thing with the LEDs is that you need to keep the + and - wires for them all together. One lead is shorter than the other. They are forgiving....you can put the leads to a battery and either it will light up, or it won't, and it won't burn out. The electro-luminescent wire is fun to play with! You just buy the wire, a battery-operated driver, and hook everything up. You can either buy bulk wire, which requires soldering to connect it to the driver, or pre-cut pieces with connectors that require no soldering. I then wired everything together with a small switch in the base (slightly visible in the pictures. poking up behind the left foot). I used a 2-AA cell battery pack and wired it both to the EL driver and to all the LEDs. If you *don't* feel competent with a soldering iron, CoolNeon sells "Instant gratification" EL wire kits that just require snapping connectors together. You can also get drivers that sequence through the colors, and drivers that respond to sound. They sometimes offer some completely pre-made units that include multiple-colored wires already attached to a driver. It's really fun to work with this stuff. I'm currently making another one to give to Touma-san in Pasadena next weekend.
fucking rad..... nice job. i don't know how Rhinomilk's polka skuttle beat your Times Square Skuttle.
