Introduction: Dollar Store Glowing Eye

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About: I love the Instructables! Why? It affords me an easy opportunity to offer some payback to the growing collection of human ingenuity. I'm awestruck by the constant displays of ingenuity. I see this commun…

Halloween, a great time to explore your creativity.  The Dollar Store is a wonderful adjunct to support your Halloween projects, affordable and troves of opportunities to create something new that is affordable.

In this instructable I'm going to show you how to build a glowing eyeball using components found at the dollar store.

In addition I'm going to show how to disassemble a malfunctioning tealight for reuse.

created using instructables for android

editied on a PC, sadly can't do all that I want with the droid platform at this time

Step 1: Materials

Bag of Halloween zombie eyeballs

Package of tea lights

Nice to have:

Thermal Adhesive Extruder A.K.A Hot Glue Gun

Electrical tape

Step 2: Tools

Drill motor

1/2 inch drill bit

a means to clamp the eyeball when drilling

Step 3: Assembly

mark the eye where you want to drill the hole

clamp the eye

drill the hole

insert the tea light into the opening

VOILA!

Step 4: Completed Dollar Store Glowing Eye

Step 5: Repurpose a Malfunctioning Tea Light to Make a Glowing Eye Without a Base

Those tea lights are really cheap and that's evident in the build quality.

The switch is the mechanism most prone to failure.  I guarantee a good amount of the tea lights purchased (for me 20%)will require some tinkering.

Sometimes you just can't make the switch work properly however don't despair, repurpose the tea light.

The LED in the tea light is fully self contained, no current limiting resistor needed, no additional circuitry needed, just hook it up to a 3 volt power supply.

Look at the following images to assist with disassembly of the tea light.

All you need to do is wrap the LED contacts around the battery using electrical tape (white works best) and you have a long lasting (120 hours) flickering LED that fits perfectly inside of a zombie eyeball.

If you have trouble making good contact with electrical tape alone you can add a small piece of aluminum foil to the contact area.

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