We made our Skeleton into a DIY HALLOWEEN ANIMATRONIC! 💀

Ahoy there today we're going to show you how to turn a plastic skeleton into your very own drunken pirate animatronic for Halloween somewhere in this video we are giving away this animatronic to one of our us subscribers so you best be paying attention first we start with one of these plastic skeletons that you can get at any store then we rip off his head and break his bones then we're gonna build him a PVC mechanism and we're gonna use a wiper motor to make him move finally we're gonna give him some old tattered clothes and Rotting Flesh to complete his look screwdriver I think this is filled with spiders oh good good ah what that oh no it's a wasp nest even better what this is not gonna work okay we need a saw he's like oh that was easy why is he missing a leg oh who knows because we do stuff like this all the time yeah this guy's arms are posable so he's a good skeleton but I hate his head it's terrible for he's a different head this head oh my often the simplest solution is the right song I also like that this skeleton already has a little bit of a curve to the spine when we did our other groundbreaker we spent a lot of time heat bending but it's a real pain in the neck or in the back I guess I think we're gonna wait to break his arms off give him a little piece for now but next step make his mechanism I've gathered all the stuff I think we need for this animatronic let's take a look why are they in a Nemo lunchbox we'll get to that foreign the swaying animatronic is classic home hunters have been building this for decades and there's a ton of different ways to do it what we're after is one that looks really good has good motion but is also easy enough to build with simple tools and materials we came across a recent blog post from a hunt called demon ground and they came up with a brilliantly simple way to do this for like a standing up zombie so we're going to try to adapt their method we'll put a link to it in the video description so you can check it out so the key to this whole thing being so simple are these really clever PVC joints so let's go ahead and make one for each joint the first thing you need are two PVC end caps we need these to sit flat but they've got some like weird stuff on the bottom some little writing so we're just going to sand that off with some sandpaper and then you'll have a nice smooth surface next we'll drill a hole in the end that fits our quarter 20 bolts we put a washer on each end put the bolt through the hole then slide some spacers on that fit inside it to keep it from wobbling in the middle is a big washer and if you want to get fancy you could put a little grease on this so it spins smoothly the rest of the pieces go on in reverse and on the end we use a lock nut so that it doesn't come off so now we've built this joint we can see how it just sort of fits into these existing PVC pieces and they rotate I've cut off a couple pieces of half inch PVC to use as just little connectors but it's basically like grown-up Legos you got a bunch of pieces and they all go together it's fun so in the center there's this cross and this is where these little joints come in this goes like this now the spine will rotate in the middle so if we imagine that this is the skeleton we can actually get this awesome swaying movement Isn't that cool it's so simple the next thing we're going to do is put a motor under here to actually automate it but before we do that we're going to check in with Jamie and see how she's doing with turning our boring skeleton into a horrible zombie house you're gonna give him a scowl yes he's very angry at the living I think agree with the living too if I was a zombie I think we all would yeah very skeleton okay I may have gone a little bit overboard on sculpting the eyebrows and it's probably going to be covered up with the zombie skin anyway but I was having fun now I'm going to cut his teeth off you're gonna cut his teeth off yeah it's because I have better teeth to give him there we go I feel like the pain in his eyebrows is like he's so you're ripping my teeth out one really easy way to make these guys look better is to get rid of the fake fake teeth and give them better fake teeth you can get these online for pretty cheap and then you just put them in with hot glue put them in crooked some are missing it just looks so much better now he has some proper Chompers a hot glue does jaw open but I think I'm going to take some of the epoxy putty and reinforce that just so it doesn't melt close but now he's good so we're gonna let him dry till tomorrow we need to take our hole mechanism and attach it to a base but before we do that we need to figure out how the motor is going to attach to the base now we could just sort of screw it down to the wood like this and leave it there but we want it to work outside and we get a lot of rain in October so that's where the lunchbox comes in I'm going to attempt to use my son's old lunchbox and create like a waterproof container for the motor and the electronics don't know if this is going to work but we're going to try it the only thing I've done is I took a piece of wood and I super glued it in there just to give this top a little bit more rigidity because we're going to basically attach the motor to the top with the motor mounting screws right here so the first thing we got to do is drill a bunch of holes to try to get that working I think if we put it and we can mark the position of holes and then I can drill it like that we've got a couple of washers in here just to like fill the space [Music] look at that motor in a lunchbox it's like pretty rigid there's no flex or anything so I don't know we'll see as we get further along but I'm I'm feeling good about this right now eventually I'm gonna put like some silicone and all these little holes I'm making so that water doesn't leak into here but first I want to just kind of prototype the whole thing I'll go back and do that later now it's time to attach our PVC mechanism to the wood and to do that we're going to use these flanges and these basically the PVC goes in here and you screw these down to the floor this is all made from half inch PVC to keep it as small as possible but I was worried that it wouldn't be strong enough so I got the bigger one inch flanges and then we just got like this little adapter and now the half inch can fit into the one inch flange and it will strengthen everything that's the Hope also the last time we made our own animatronic we designed our own 3D printable flanges which you can get on our patreon but we're trying to do this whole project with no 3D printing which is why we're using these other ones okay I put a little connector on here and then we're going to take our little metal arm which goes on the motor put it inside our connector and then feed it on to the motor here tighten this down I've got my wires coming out let's give it a test and see what happens yes lunchbox animatronic Pretend This is a skeleton whoo this is awesome it's way more sturdy than I expected there's a lot we can do to change like how far over it leans and how fast it goes but we're going to do all that later because first we have to build a zombie to Now put on this thing I'm going to attach this PVC pipe to the skeletons and to do that we're using JB Weld plastic weld which is like epoxy putty made for plastic [Music] hopefully that's enough we'll find out in 30 minutes or so bone yellow so that a lot of this will be this will be covered up but it's colors match we have our plastic rum bottle and I'm just going to make it look a little Dusty with some gray paint this is just acrylic paint super cheap easy and shouldn't wash off in the rain that bottle came out good yes what do you do with a drunken sailor shave his belly with a rusty razor wait wait okay you could use a rusty razor or you could use one of these sweet al13 razors from the sponsor of this video Henson shaving okay check it out as Founders have an aerospace machine shop that was hit a little hard by the pandemic so they decided to use their fancy equipment to make Precision single blade safety razors you're saying the same shop that made parts for the Mars rover made this razor yep space razor and it's that Precision that gives you an amazing shave most razors don't hold the blades that well which allows them to flex and vibrate along your skin which is one of the top causes of irritation razor burn and angry Pirates are my skin probably shouldn't shave with a sword either no the al-13 holds the blade at an optimal angle and it only extends 13 thousandths of an inch past the shave plane Which is less than the thickness of one human hair and there's zero waste it's made totally of metal and all the blades are 100 recyclable they're a bit of an investment but once you've actually purchased your Henson razor the cost of ownership is only three to five dollars per year and look how pretty use the code Wicked makers to get a hundred blades for free with the purchase of a razor that's two to four years worth of blades depending on how often you shave check the link in the description below and thanks for supporting our Channel now back to it this totally works we actually went back though and we cut off way more of his spine and just did the whole process again because he was too tall when he was way up there his torso was like freakishly long some of these plastic skeletons have a pretty decent range of motion but what I'm doing here is actually just cutting away some of the extra plastic that's going to let me move the shoulders and elbows even further so I can get a better pose now that we've got the arm exactly where we want it we're going to screw it in place so that it can't move on our drinking skeleton we glued all the joints in place which worked fine but you're kind of stuck with that pose you know if you want to change it later you can whereas here if we make a mistake I can just pull these screws out and try again on the other arm I did the same thing on the elbow to lock it in place but for the shoulder I'm keeping this one loose I want to try something here where we're letting it move a little bit and then I'm using a little piece of fishing line that's tied from one of the screws just around the rib cage and I'm hoping it'll just move in a cool way let's check it out yes now we've got some nice secondary motion on this arm we're going to keep this arm stiff because it's going to be holding the bottle and I'm super happy with this so far we started off using a heat gun to soften the fingers and then bend them but to be honest it didn't work that well we discovered though that if you snip a little bit of the plastic on the outer side of the joint that you can then bend the fingers into basically whatever pose you want it is time to stain our bones and that's so we can make our skeleton look old and decayed and stuff there's a lot of different ways to stain a skeleton you can use wood stain you can use spray paint but for this guy I'm going to use an acrylic wash since we painted the head first and it doesn't have that smooth plastic finish the acrylic's really going to work best here all right it gives us a good place to start with and it helps bring out like the detail in the cracks and things on the rest of the body I'm working in small sections and hitting it with a dark brown spray paint and then quickly wiping it away this works great you just have to work really fast this is a really cool trick I learned from the Stan Winston school if you dab some barge on your skeleton and then hit it with a blow dryer while stretching it out it gives you an awesome webbing effect it dries really fragile but we're going to come back later and reinforce it the next stage is adding flesh again working in small sections I spray an area with 78 glue and then dab on some cotton using cotton balls I don't want to cover up all the bones so I'll just do this where I want patches of Rotting Flesh to be it's so fuzzy I know it's so fluffy he's not gonna stay like that he's going through his awkward fuzzy phase She's Gotta trust the process next we're going to tap all of this cotton down with latex and that's going to give them a really cool skin texture [Music] um I also brush on a couple of light layers of latex on the glue webs to give them some extra strength [Music] look at this this is amazing I love the way this gooey texture came out and it was so easy to do like this is something you can do to any of your skeletons and just get amazing results before we paint I think I need to weather his clothes just like our last pirate we got our clothes from the thrift store and we're gonna slash and tear them up and then throw some paint on them you know we consistently find these crazy pirate style pants at the thrift store yes we do so do you think I should cut the bottom off or do we just kind of roll them up Pirates yeah they'll kind of just be torn at the knee I think so yeah there we go okay I didn't think you were gonna cut both okay yeah no that's awesome cool yeah no what that's fine yes yes now he's got pirate shorts did I cut them too short um okay I can fix this hold on are you just gonna like tape them together don't worry about what I'm doing okay okay what are you doing that looks amazing well we want it to be like super shredded Like Pirates of the Caribbean style so I'm just slashing it all over the place and then roughing up the edges with like a really stiff wire brush the best sews the shirt did you fix the pants uh yeah okay awesome nothing ever happened no and no one will ever know you could have at least lined the stripes up I did I did on one leg I forgot to let listen we all make mistakes it's part of the process let's let's just move past this and what are we uh are you gonna kind of cut them up the same way yeah I think we should shred them up to the knee okay I'm gonna weather the clothes now so they look dirty and like they've been rotting away just like our skeleton has to do that I'm going to use finger painting method but I'm going to get the clothes wet first and I'm thinking that might give me some softer edges to the paint do a little variety of colors dirt some some Moss some black some Ooze that looks so cool they're gonna dry lighter hopefully not too much lighter than this but I'm happy with them this guy looks really cool and I think you could get away with not painting him at all I think the only thing that I personally don't like is all of the white highlights from the cotton so I want to take those down so if you do want to paint your skeleton zombie guy there's a couple easy ways to do it you can use wood stain throw it over the whole thing and then wipe it off and what that'll do is provide a really nice contrast it'll make all your details really pop and your high spots will stay lighter you can also do acrylic paint and then wood stain on top of that a lot of people do that I think what I'm going to start with is some selective acrylic paint and then go from there thank you now that he's painted we can finally attach the head and to do that we're going to use this five minute epoxy which is meant for plastic and it should go on pretty easy all right let's see where that gets us this so I'm gonna hold this can you just tape it to the back and now I can just kind of put a little more epoxy in here to make sure it's in the right spot foreign [Music] this is a synthetic hair they use to make braids you can get it at any beauty supply store to attach it to his head I'm using some spray adhesive and then tapping it down towards the top he's gonna have a bandana on so I'm not too worried about his hairline but I do tap it down with latex to help blend it in and lock it in place [Music] I think we're finally ready to put everything together and I've Got The Lunchbox situation all finalized so let's take a look so first up is our power supply this gets plugged into the wall and then we come over here and we drilled a hole in the side and we've got a little Barrel Jack and we filled the edges with silicone so that water can't get in but this will just plug in just like that so here's where the power comes in and everything is wired up to the wiper motor we've also added a speed controller just like on our Huggy wuggy animatronics so that we can control how fast the motor goes now there's a lot of leftover space in here and we could add some more stuff so for example this is called a prop controller and we could put that in here to actually control having it turn on and off and things like that and animate it a little bit we also have a motion sensor which we could hook up to the prop controller so that it only turns on when somebody walks up to it you can even put a sound board in there to have custom pirate sound effects going on as he's moving around that all gets kind of technical though and for this one we're just going to keep it simple but if you are interested in seeing how that stuff works let us know in the comments we gave him a waste this is so well he has a waist but it also serves Dual Purpose the clothes aren't going to get but also so his pants don't get caught up in the mesh we cut a hole in his butt right here that's so it can go over this it wasn't that funny just keep going okay we cut a hole so that it would fit over this stuff yes and there's like a wire that goes around here that is so the waist of the pants can go around this wire and not interfere with all of the motor and stuff we made a peg leg check it out we took some pink foam and made you know like a big rectangle carved it into a pegish shape and then Jamie gave it some really cool paint and now our pirate has a peg leg R put me body back on I'm afraid to put his shirt on I know we do I don't know if it's gonna this shirt's way too big for him you know it's uh it sure is something and I don't like that something do you draw him he zombie Corps scene stuff we did is just covered and gone should we try no shirt and maybe put the vest on foreign a lot has happened since we took off the shirt it was designed to look good but also to cover up all of this PVC stuff and then as soon as we decided we didn't want to use it anymore we had a new problem which was you could see the whole mechanism specifically though you could see how wide it was it had like massive pirate hips would you say the pirate had too much booty so to fix that problem we've made some changes the main thing we changed was making the entire thing thinner by replacing these outer PVC pipes with these little L brackets and you can see from the old hips here just how much of a difference that made to make the L brackets you could just use these metal ones like you'd use on shelving but we actually made our own from a piece of aluminum it's super easy to bend this stuff and drill holes in it so you can kind of make brackets to the exact size you want the brackets got bolted onto the lunch box the same way we bolted on the motor since it was a little wobbly we just put these pipes in to sort of stabilize and make everything rigid and then finally up here the PVC is bolted to the brackets and that's how everything rotates I think the previous version worked just fine and if you're doing something bigger this wouldn't matter at all but we needed to like shrink everything down and now it's working great so time to put them back together our [Music] somewhere in this video this little skeleton guy has popped up to say hello if you want a chance to win this animatronic let us know in the comments how many times you see him pop up and what you think we should name our new pirate just make sure you're subscribed and you're in the US so that we can send it to you this golf is made by techy toys they make a lot of the awesome animatronics you see at Spirit Home Depot and all over the place around Halloween we'll announce the winner on September 1st and now let's check out our pirate this is the end of this video but if you want to see more pirate stuff search for the drinking skeletons until next time say Wicked

Channel: Wicked Makers

Views: 558,503

Keywords: DIY Halloween, Halloween DIY, DIY Halloween Props, Halloween Props DIY, DIY Halloween decorations, DIY halloween decor, halloween decor, halloween decorations, halloween props, jay and jaimie, halloween diy, wicked makers, drinking skeleton, pirate skeleton, drinking pirate, skeleton pirate, skeleton fountain, diy drinking skeleton, diy skeleton, drunken pirate, animatronic, halloween animatronic, scary skeleton, scary skeleton animatronic, diy halloween, diy animatronic

Id: Z5NUTYbli7Y

Length: 20min 24sec (1224 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 15 2023