Thread: Spirit ball witch head on Mrs Claus body

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Mom dropped off some decorations and one of them was a 5ft Mrs Claus also have a santa Im gonna use as a base similar to the witch.

Im still working on her costume, shes wearing something I threw together that was on hand.

She has a spirit ball witch head that I totally disassembled and removed the floaty head animation, so she just has the lights and audio atm.

You can hear the whirring from the mechanism that makes the head float in the ball when she speaks. I am not technically savvy enough to try tinkering further than removing the band, so you hear it whizzing away since it doesnt have tension anymore. bummer.

The Mrs Claus body wouldnt move (since Im not tech savvy) ,I decided to use her as a witch. I have so many spirit balls I really needed to do SOMETHING with one after having them in the shed for over 2 years, lol.

She isnt responsive to light changes but clapping or loud noises or bopping her a bit gets her going. I will have to figure out a way to animate her more reliably. She doesnt have a step pad type jack, I may hook her up to my motion lights thingy.

I dont have a name for her, most of my witches dont

I need to get a prop for her, and I was thinking of attaching the animated broom to her, so it will move around in her hands on its own. I will be adding simple gloves with attached long nails to hide her small hands.

*Click on image to "PLAY" it and see her in action.Non float version



*click on image to play- FLOAT version

She looks really good.Keep the animation.

Nice looking witch!
I have that same spirit ball and I tried to use that same head on my Rocking Granny when I built it last year.
But it was so heavy she couldn't rock properly. LOL I used a styrofoam wig head and a mask instead.

Thanks! I added a poll because I dont know if I should keep her original floaty head animation or just the mouth movement/lights/audio.

Realistically, no ones head extends up and down like it does in the spirit ball. But I feel there should be some head movement. I wish she had a left to right nod animation like the other Gemmy life sized witches. I can enable the floaty up and down but I dont know if it looks right, lol.

Kittyvibe, she looks great all dressed up! I think I might have bought the witch also the same year you did, and have the white haired guy heads to work on too. If I remember correctly someone mentioned how to remove the wires so that the head doesn't roll. I'm thinking it was mentioned during a discussion about the white haired guy's hack and it's probably the same method on the witch's head.

The head roll always bothered me on the white haired guy and while I haven't eliminated it on my white haired guy #1 yet, I will. If he just tilted his head every so often it wouldn't be so annoying. I guess you can gather from my comments which way I would say to go.

I'm curious how you joined the head to the body. I still haven't removed the base ring yet and was wondering if I should use it as something to maybe put bolts through to anchor it to a shoulder frame. It is a pretty heavy head and I certainly would enjoy seeing his head roll when the ToTers were watching for a scare but it would probably trash his "brains" leaving him comotose!

Oh yes! we were all a'buzz with Ross activity that year. I have maybe 8 or so of the white haired guys and mics, along with the standard big ones w/out mics (Frankenstein, skeleton, gypsy, 2 different faces male genie types and bald guy like the butler one).

what was funny is that when searching the site to dismantle these things I came across my thread about hacking the ross ones Gemmy Crystal Ball audio line-in hack. I think it was one of your posts that led me to where I ultimately found a way to remove the head from the base.

I didnt want to get into it too much, like cutting up and splicing, soldering etc. One person mentioned simply unhooking the rubber band to stop the bobbing, so I did that in the first video there. Unfortunately, it still spins in the mechanism, so you can hear the whirr loudly.

There is a method to undo the whirring but it involves more than Im ready to try (and potentially ruin since Im a noob).

To remove her from base, I recommend you wait to unscrew the little bits until you have the skull removed completely, otherwise its a big annoyance.

You have to remove the screws in the "skull" and separate the plastic halves. If you pull it apart you will see it has tabs on the very inside and top of the mechanism that you will need to make sure the skull re-attaches to afterward.

You can then unscrew the 2 big bolts at the base of the mechanism on the left and right sides. From there are tiny screws in the front that hold down the mechanism. You must remove these to get the the silver spike pin.

The spike pins look like its a part of the mechanism but its really just holding it down even more in place. Use tweezers or computer chip grippers to pull out the 2 silver pins. From there it pops out easily and you can start unscrewing all the other pieces, like the speaker, DC in plug, switch and 2 lights.

You will have another last hangup with cutting the 2 wires from the battery compartment on the base. make sure to cap them off with electrical tape.

Piece the moving mechanism, then the skull back together and push the face back on the skull. Test to make sure it works. If you remove the black rubber band you will disable to bobbing.

I placed some electrical tape along the seams and plugged up holes near the bottom of the neck stump to protect it from the heat in my glue gun. The Mrs Claus had a neck base I glued my witch neck into, being careful not to put glue on the back side of the stump where it looked like a bad idea. Theres some electronic part there. You will also need to protect the whirring mechanism in the from with more tape because it might short the motor trying to spin in hardened hotglue.

Mrs Claus neck-piece is the brown part, if you notice the flange tabs on the bottom, this helped it to lock into the base of the body with no lean over.

Pic below of neck completed.