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 Here you can see the sound chip, which is a small black box that records any
message for up to about 8 seconds and then will play it back when the little
sensor (the brass tube) senses a change in heat. This particular one came from
Terror By Design. We will be talking about this in a moment. The same as we did
when modifying the Boris head for the Crypt Keeper, we will once again be
cutting off the microphone and soldering our inline electronics to the center
wire.
The photo above shows the skull cap of the head, the black cover that holds
the batteries and the circuit board removed from the skull. The pot has three
legs that come out of the bottom. One leg is on the top side and the other two
are both coming out of the bottom side of it. The silver thing you see below the
round white potentiometer is an 1/8" phone jack with the square green thing
on the left is the capacitor. It is important to get this hooked up correctly so
carefully follow these written instruction as the picture is nothing more than a
jumble to the eye. The phone jack has two legs that we will be soldering to.
First we will attach one leg of the capacitor to the CENTER wire lead of the
phone jack. The other lead on the jack is the ground and contacts the main shaft
of the plug that goes into it. The lead we want to attach the capacitor to is
the one that contacts with the tip of the plug you will insert into it later.
Now, solder the other leg of the capacitor to the center leg of the pot. Now
solder a jumper wire to one of the two legs of the pot that come out of the
bottom side. The only other leg left of the pot, the other bottom side leg will
be soldered to the red center wire from the Boris skull. Now solder BOTH the
jumper from one of the two bottom legs of the pot AND the outside ground wire to
the ground tab on the jack. Once you have this wired it is time to solder on two
lightweight wire leads to each connector on the back of the speaker in the
repeater chip box. One will be going to the skull and the other to your
amplifier and remote sound. For some odd reason you cannot cut the wires of the
speaker inside the skull head and have the jaw movement still work. At least
this one didn't so leave your speaker connected even if you plan to give your
Lacerated Larry a big, life sized voice like I gave mine. It is a good idea to
make the sound line from the speaker to your amp at least 15' long, as you never
know how much you will need later to travel to your sound amplifier. The other
lead will be zip tied to the PVC pipe chest and down his arm where the talking
head will be. On the other end of each wire connect 1/8" male phone plugs.
Now test your system with one of the sound leads to the skull and make sure it
works. If it does, you can mount the female phone jack in the back of the skull
head and close everything up.
 On the back of the chest section of my figure I mounted a 1/4" piece of
wood for mounting my sound repeater and the battery box as well as the little
separate button that triggers the recording onto the chip. The lines out of the
box are zip tied to the skeleton, your 15' one down to the bottom of one of his
legs, as this will be going into a karaoke machine for our voice. The other to
the skull. Finally the heat sensor will be routed out to the end of his free
hand, as this must be as close to the TOT as you can get it for it to trigger. I
mounted this inside one of his fingers at the very tip and painted it the same
flesh color as I painted his hands.
In the same photo above you will see a red light at approximately where a
person's heart would be located. This is a night light base zip tied to the back
of the chest upright. On the end of the power cord to the night light will be a
Blinky that goes between the plug end and the wall socket. Now our unlucky Larry
will also have a beating heart radiating through his shirt like the skeleton bride in the Haunted Mansion in Disneyland.
 I start clothing Larry with a thick sweater to smooth out the joints of his
skeleton and once I have it positioned where I want, I use fender washers and
screws to attach it to a couple of places on his chest.
 Now I can confidently
cut out a peek-a-boo spot for the beating heart to shine through and illuminate
behind his white shirt. It is time to dress up for the party. Here I simply cut a section of round
cardboard tube used as the core of a bolt of fabric, slipped it around his neck
bone and screwed it to his top shoulder rail. Then using a small pneumatic cut
off tool I ground hack marks into his "neck". Of course I painted the
neck with the same skin colored paint and then highlighted as you can see with
blood red. The neck bone was gray with black highlights at the vertebras.
 To highlight the turning neck bone, I made a large knife out of some scrap
wood and painted it to look realistic. I glued it into a notch I cut out of the
top of the neck bone PVC pipe.
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