Recursos y servicios de intervención comunitaria

Figure 6-16 Telephone audio interface shown in two flavors

Project 25—Evil Lurching Head

This project is guaranteed to make your victims jump clear out of their shoes and cling to the ceiling! It doesn’t matter how tough your buddies

are because when a life-sized head pops out of the least expected place, they will jump or screech every time. This spring loaded head can be placed

behind furniture, a shrub, building, or outside a window for activation by remote, wire, or light, depending on how you decide to trigger it. Since the concept is very simple and easy to build, you can easily adapt the device to suit your particular application, be it indoors or outside. Feel free to mount whatever you like at the end of the spring- loaded arm, but keep in mind that the heavier the object, the larger the spring that will be needed in order to make the object pop into view quickly. A foam head used to display wigs and sunglasses are perfect and can be covered in masks or even dressed up to look somewhat realistic. I did not have a Styrofoam head at my disposal, so I simply found some packing foam and traced out four 6-inch diameter disks to create my own simple head. My idea was to make a crude head-shaped foam insert to fill the black balaclava as shown in Figure 6-17. The foam disks were crudely cut and then glued together using some spray adhesive. A talented sculptor with a sharp knife could have carved up a very realistic head from the foam block, but since I was just going to throw the mask over it, a basic human head-sized globe was fine. The foam block is very lightweight, so it should spring up very quickly, and not cause a problem if it is allowed to thump off a window during outdoor attacks. Figure 6-18 shows the four foam disks ready to be cut after the spray adhesive has set.

The arm used to swing the head into place should also be as light as possible, so a wooden stick about the same size as a broom handle will be perfect. The length of the stick will depend on your target installation, so it must be made long enough to place the head over the object that it is hiding behind. For outdoor use behind a window, the length of the arm is not critical since you will have to place the base of the launcher on top of a ladder or tall object to bring it up to the window height anyhow. A 3-foot long arm should be just about right for most furniture if you just want to make an all-purpose lurching head. The arm should be fastened to the head using a few long woodscrews and some glue as shown in Figure 6-19. If you are covering up the foam, a little duct tape around the head and arm will hold it very securely, and there will be no chance of a spontaneous

Project 25—Evil Lurching Head

Figure 6-17 A few foam disks will form a head insert Figure 6-18 Foam disks glued and ready to cut

decapitation when the head swings into place. Figure 6-19 also shows the foam head after

chopping away the corners for a little more human- like appearance.

The launching mechanism is very simple,

consisting of a small hinge and a 6-inch long spring from the hardware store. The spring is about the size of a large marker, and can be pulled apart by hand without needing a great deal of force. If the spring is too strong, your lurching head will become a cranium-launching trebuchet, which would certainly be cool, but not the goal of this project. If you can’t

Project 25—Evil Lurching Head

Figure 6-20 _{The spring-loaded arm and mounting base}

Figure 6-21 _{Loaded and locked by the finishing nail}

find an appropriate spring, then a few large elastic bands or even a chopped up bicycle inner tube could fit the bill as well, but you will have to experiment to get the perfect amount of force and speed from the swinging arm. Figure 6-20 shows how the swinging arm is mounted to a wooden base that allows it to be pulled into the upright position by the spring. Also shown is the small eye hook that allows the device to be locked into the loaded position by placing a finishing nail through the hole of the eye hook into a hole in the arm.

Figure 6-21 shows the arm in the loaded position, held in place by the finishing nail, which can be easily pulled out to send the arm flying back into the upright position. The actual trigger mechanism can take many forms from a simple thread that is manually pulled to a remote- controlled servo system like the one presented in

the next project. Another good mechanical launch system that uses an electromagnetic solenoid was shown in Chapter 3, Projects 6 and 7, if you want to automate the lurching head. The nail or pin that releases the arm should come free with almost no friction, so make sure the hole in the wooden arm is slightly bigger than the actual pin.

The base of my lurching head unit is quite small, so I have to weigh it down with a few pounds when I set up the device or the action of the swinging head makes it fall over. In outdoor installations, it can be tied down to the top of a ladder or bucket so the head will pop up smack dab in the center of a window, scaring the wits out of the person inside as it thuds against the glass. The foam-filled balaclava does not look all that realistic on second glance, but it certainly gets the initial shock factor prize. In Figure 6-22, the

ping-pong ball-eyed lurching head awaits its next victim, patiently waiting behind a filing cabinet for the next person to open the door and pull the launch pin. Notice the three-pound rock I used to hold down the base to keep the head from jumping off the platform right over the cabinet. In this installation, a length of sewing thread was

connected to the door to the room so that opening a cabinet drawer simply pulled the launching pin.

The lurching head can also be triggered by a light-activated solenoid like the one shown in Chapter 3, Project 6, or by the remote-controlled servo system shown in the next project for an all- out haunted house setup. Fishing line is also great

for triggering devices in dimly lit rooms or outdoor settings because it is extremely difficult to see and can be strung hundreds of feet without any

problem. The most effective ways to get someone with the lurching head is to have them trigger the launching mechanism on entering a room by direct connection to a door or light switch, or by

manually launching the unit with a hidden string at the opportune moment for maximum hair-raising impact. Having the head pop up in front of a window at night after telling your buddy that some twisted evil-looking figure just hobbled across the yard would certainly be a good setup, especially after watching four hours of gory movies!