Crypt KEEpEr

UpdatE!

   Here is the Boris with the top of his skull removed and the microphone cord cut. On the skull cap I attached an 1/8" phone jack that I will be attaching the mic. lead to once I install the capacitor. This is not the location I used for the Crypt Keeper's new skull, as he will be fully viewed from the front and both sides. The phone jack I placed in the CK skull was below the black cover you see on the left of the photo, down inside the base of the back of the head. In this terrible picture you may be able to see the idea of how to attach your capacitor and resistor. They will be placed on the red, or inside wire with the capacitor soldered on the wire closest to the boris skull first and the resistor soldered closest to the phone jack. The shield wire will then be attached to the outside post of the phone jack for ground and the red to the center. It is of note to mention here that this took days to determine the exact capacitor / resistor combination that will make this work at a level that is audible by using the headphones out jack of a cassette player. However, this will not work with a little handheld player or little CD player as they simply do not deliver enough volume. You must use one of the larger players meant to be listened to like a stereo in your room.

   Now that we have a voice, I need to make my plain skull look a little more like that handsome creature from the late night spooky show. First you must remove his LED eyes so they won't light up and lend a comical look to the face. Next his eye cavities are filled in with approximately one third of a ping pong ball apiece. It isn't hard to cut them out with a pair of scissors and shape them to fit the ocular cavity. Hot glue holds them in place very well. Next I sprayed the skull down with a light coat of gray paint so the skull wouldn't be as hard to fully color later. On top of the paint I sprayed the entire skull down with a coat of spray adhesive by 3M. This worked to give me a surface that I could glue paper hand towels to give him skin.

   I have been wondering for years if yellow woodworker's glue could be used to replace the Phlx glue that is used to make skin as seen in my website under Rotting Corpse. This is the first time I put it to the test and it worked perfectly. I mixed about 1/4 cup of woodworker's glue with about 1/2 cup of warm water and mix till it is thoroughly dissolved. Next I took strips of thick paper hand towels like you find in a commercial restroom and soaked it in the glue mix. I mashed up a ball of the paper mache' like material and filled in the cavity of the nose first. I then began laying on strips to the skull and formed it to the contours with my fingers. You must be very careful to keep your strips precisely following the separation of the top of the skull, as this must be able to be removed later to install batteries. Once he was fully covered I painted the skull in a brown color like the real CK. 

   The photo here shows how the center of his eyes were drilled out and he got a head of hair, all in the same effort to bring him closer to the "real" CK. The hair was cut from a cheap mask that came with a long white head of hair. Working from the bottom up I used the 3M spray adhesive one section at a time and then rubbed a bundle of the hair about 1/4" dia. at the very top of the shock against the adhesive. Overall he doesn't look bad and with the real CK voice coming from the synchronized mouth movements, it is very convincing. Far more so than with the previous head.  

   The cassette player I used initially for the voice of our chatty friend failed this year and I replaced it with a much larger unit that was no longer able to be mounted inside his chest. Luckily I had the space beneath the seat in the Death Chair that allowed me to store it and also send sound up through the seat to speakers I mounted in his chest. However I decided not long after this rebuild to eliminate the analog cassette player altogether and replaced that with a Mimic Machine playback chip device. To amplify the sound from the playback device I used a small karaoke machine that you see here. Now rather than just talking all night, he merely plays back an 8 second clip as the TOTs pass by, triggered by remote control. The resistors in his talking skull had to be replaced with the same set up you see used in Lacerated Larry to accommodate the different signal level produced by the small device. Whew! This boy has had a LOT of work done to him by now!

   And here is how our chatting creep looks in all his gory. The new Death Chair gives him a much more prominent stature, as does his new animations. See him in action here.