Hey You Dirty Rat! - Adding LED eyes to a vinyl Rat

Well we all know how much people love rats. The people that know me know that I can not leave well enough alone when I buy something. So when I went to Big Lots last year and bought a couple rats on clearance for about $2.50 each. I knew that I was going to change them up a little. What could I do to make them more "scary?" Well I figured what is scarier than a pair of red beady eyes staring at you in the dark? So I added some leds to the eyes. Low voltage rocks....

Difficulty Rating:  2.5

Materials:

• RATS!! I bought mine form Big Lots after Halloween on sale for $2.50 each.
• Resistors (you will have to calculate the resistors you will need for this project based on the LEDs you are using.) Look at the article LED basics to learn more.
• Super Glue
• Dremel Tool (optional to cut holes in rats.)
• Wire (I used cat5 cable wire.)
• Soldering Gun and Solder

Instructions:

1. The first thing that needs to be done is to take apart the rats. This is easy and in my rats all i had to do was take the cover from the bottom of the rat off and take out all the scarp foam in the rats.

2. Next I took the LEDs and figured out how much wire I needed to run the wire from the head to the back of the rat.

3. Once that was done I soldered in the LEDs to make the circuit. Including the resistor that I calculated earlier.

4. After the circuit was made I dremelled out part of the eyes so that the LEDs would fit inside. The eyes were then super glued in to keep them from moving.

5. Once the rat and circuit was completed I tested everything to make sure it still worked.

6. For me the final step was to fill the rat with spray foam.  

            Before                              After w LEDS lit