My niece Lexi wants to be a brain surgeon, so I decided to get her started.
It’s like the buzzing “Operation” game, but customized for Lexi. The items in the cavities represent things she likes or thinks about, and a couple of inside family jokes. I got some inkjet-printable shrink plastic to create the items. Getting the sizes and color density right took some trial and error.
It’s all in an ordinary cardboard box, with scrap-book paper glued to the outside. I suspect that the rubber cement will fail, because I didn’t tuck things in and clamp or weight them, for the most part. But rubber cement is strong enough and fast enough to use when you are scrambling to get a project together at the last possible minute.
I used a dollar-store battery-powered fan for the buzzer. Removed the foam blades and screwed a washer to the side of the hub to provide an off-center vibrating effect. I interrupted the current path at the fan switch, and ran one side to the sheet of steel, the other to some garage-sale tweezers, with a globby, ugly solder job.
I should have taken more in-progress photos, in particular of the process I used for the cavities. They are just holes drilled with Forstner bits into a scrap of MDF. The sheet steel was easy to perforate with a stepless drill, then connecting the drill holes by cutting with a Dremel. Not real neat, but I finished the project in time. Barely.
The brain image is just printed in ink-jet. I probably should have laminated it, or at least used a laser printer for a slightly more durable image.
I’m fairly happy with the project, and very happy with Lexi’s reaction, especially when she touched the edge of a cavity and it buzzed at her.
This project was inspired by this one from Make Magazine.