Thread: Need Help Modifying this Scythe

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Okay, I stopped by a local party store and bought the only half decent scythe (sickle) w/ the skull bone screaming. This scythe has some major lacking and I would like to do some major upgrades to it. If anyone here's good w/ electronics, I'm willing to listen to other alternatives or places where I can buy the described below. Thanks in advance!

There are the following mods I would like to apply to it but need some suggestions/advice in doing so.


1. Put some Red Led where the eye sockets are and have them turn on and off

2. Have the Red Led lights activated by a push switch (on/off), What would make this even more fantastic would be a switch that would be a pressure sensitive control, so the harder I push the light, the brighter it gets, this would prove to be a truly unique effect and look more frightening, but I don't want that to sacrifice the ability to turn off and on the light as well, if I have to build to sets of led and switches then so be it.

3. Replace the cheap plastic staff w/ a custom cut wooden staff that's much taller in height and somehow embed the wire and switch in it. It's gotta be a bit lighter than normal wood and sturdy enough to hold or lean against.

i have the same one and i repainted mine and used glow paint to make the eyes. you would need to split it open, carve a place in each eye and thread the leds in. Not sure about the push on.

Drilling a hole where the eye sockets doesn't seem to be hard to do, I think I can manage on that one, it's setting up the wiring (not the threading part) w/ a switch system that would pull this off to be amazing is the problem I'm faced w/.

Just a simple on/off switch is easy... LED's are simple.

Since you have 2, you'd need 6 volts to power them (they use 3v each). So thats 4 AA batteries which you could hide in the handle (or in the head maybe). Run the 2 LED's in sequence to the battery and the switch forming a simple loop. Press button, eyes light up.

The only caveat to that is unlike a lightbulb, LEDs only function if their polarity is correct - meaning postitive to one terminal, negative to the other. Switch it, and it wont light.

So a simple setup would be

Battery positive to switch, switch to positive of LED1, neg of LED1 to pos of LED2, Neg of LED2 to neg of battery.

I wired a baseball cap in 7th grade (1987 to light up with 10 LEDs using that simple setup.

Now, getting the lights to dim/brighten with pressure, now you're talking a pretty big undertaking. LEDs don't dim by default, you'd need a controller to handle that for you, and you're talking spending some money to do it. And finding a pressure sensitive pushbutton.

thanks for the tip, I'll give it a try, as far as the pressure sensitive pushbutton, where can I get one? I Google for it and turned up w/ nothing, or would it be easier to buy vs building one, keep in mind I have no electrical experience what so ever, I know how to screw a light bulb (being a dumb ass i know)

Its a lot more complicated than just getting a pressure sensitive button... the button would need to be wired to a circuit board that could read the level of pressure, and then convert that to a 'flickering' pulse to send to the LED... Like I said - LED's dont dim. You fake it by turning them on and off extremely fast. Thats done by a timer chip usually...

To make this from scratch at home you're talking buying circuit boards, timer chips, capacitors and resistors, and soldering it all together, and thats after you figure out how to translate the button pressure to a pulse sequence for the LED.

In other words, and a total amateur, I wouldnt suggest it.

I'm a fiddler... I like to learn new things. I just bought a USB connected I/O board, am hooking relays up to it, to control my display through my computer. I've no idea how to do it but I'll learn as I go. I have a base of computer programming knowledge to go off of, and a basic understanding of electronics and how those parts all interact.

However, learning the electronics necessary to build what you're attempting... Its over my head and I personally wouldnt try it

A better bet is to buy something and rip the guts out of it. I saw at K-Mart today a 3-skull lawn set that when triggered, makes an electric noise and the white LED eyes in the skeletons flicker.

It'd likely be cheaper to buy that, rip it apart, replace the white led's with red, and try and make that work in your scythe than it'd be to build what you're talking about.