ANIMATED GROUNDBREAKER CORPSES

Difficulty Rating:

In 2006, I created two groundbreaker corpses while bored and looking for a project to do, because they were cheap and easy, and I needed more corpses.

So this year, I wanted to breathe some life into at least one of them, so I started off with the lovely Inflamed Joints, as I have named him, due to his inflamed joints, of course.

And accomplished this via using a wiper motor, to move him back and fourth.

Materials:

• 50/75 RPM 12 VDC TWO SPEED GEARMOTOR (Wiper Motor)
• Hinge
• 6V, 1A Wall Wart
• Scrap wood (I used an old wood railing)
• Speakers (cheap powered PC speakers)
• The $5 MP3 Player
• 6" steel stock
• 4" Hose/Pipe clamp
• Groundbreaker Corpse!

So here's what I did...

I took the original Inflamed Joints, and inscrewed the wood post I used for his "spine", from the center of the board, and moved it up, and secured it with a small hinge I had lying around. Sorry, it's hard to see, but it's the hinge looking thing at the base of the corpse. I spraypainted everything matte black, and then decided it was a good time to start taking pictures of it... I know, how brilliant of me. I'm an engineer, not a Nobel laureate.
I took a 6V Wall Wart and hacked off the ends to expose the leads, and added some flat connectors to the ends.
Here's whe wiper motor i used...
And then took the wiper motor, removed the ball joint mount that it had on it, and mounted a piece of 6" steel stock, drilled with holes in both ends, to the wiper motor, and cut away a small section on the back of the "spine" on Inflamed Joints, and screwed in using wood screws to that, connecting both ends, and then mounted the wiper motor using a 4" pipe/hose clamp to another piece of wood stock that I had (old wood railing), and then screwed that to the plywood base that the corpse was already mounted on. Just leave a little wiggle room on both ends of the steel stock, so there is room for it to move about once the wiper motor is engaged.
Yes, we're back to the infamous "hinge photo", but this is to call attention to the power. This is a 12V gear motor, I however, used a 6V Wall Wart to power this puppy (Scary Terry has an excellnt write-up on wiper motors and their connections.) which slows down the speed of the motor, whose lowest speed is 50RPM on it's slowest setting, so by using 1/2 the voltage, I slowed the speed down by actually more than 1/2 the speed. it makes around 20 RPM currently, which turned out to be the perfect speed for this prop.
Here's a view from the front, you cannot even see (well, barely, that's why it's painted black!) the wiper motor or it's support from this angle, so it worked out good!
Here's a view from the other side...
And that is all there is to it. I created a "zombie" track and encoded it as an MP3 (here), copied it onto the $5 MP3 player, and have that hooked up to some speakers. The track will loop continuously, and since the speakers are powered, only when I trigger this prop will it start rocking back and fourth, and play the zombie track. I am using X-10 to control this prop as well remotely from the safety of my porch (that's where the beer is!). I'll get some video up of this soon as well...