Today, we're going to be building
a Harry Potter style magic wand with a shocking twist.
[Music]
Guys, I love Harry Potter.
I love Harry Potter so much.
I've read all the books.
I've watched all the movies, and just a fan all around.
And something that I've been wanting to build
for a long time is a magic wand
that actually will deliver a small electric shock.
Now, I don't want anything
that's going to truly incapacitate or injure someone,
but I did want something that's sort of a prank,
and you can just touch someone with it, press a button,
and they get zapped a little bit.
So, here's what we're going to be doing.
We've got these gag shocking pens.
If you've never seen one
of these before, here's how they work.
It's pretty simple.
There is a functioning pen to it,
but it looks like it's gonna be a click pin.
And so you give it to someone with the pen not extended,
they try and click it,
and when they do, it's zaps them.
The body of the pen and the top here are conductive,
and when you press down on the top,
it connects all of the wires inside,
and it delivers a small buzz.
It's not something that's going to hurt,
because it's intended as a joke.
It's just startling
when it's suddenly buzzes your thumb,
instead of just extending the pen at the bottom.
So what we're going to do is we're going to take all
of the electronic guts out of this pen,
change things up a little bit so we have a button
that turns it on and off,
and some leads at the front of the wand.
Hopefully, we'll end up with a wand with a shock.
Here's the basic idea.
We'll use a couple of dowels and the inside parts
of a shocking gag pen to build a wand
that can deliver a tiny electric shock to your friends.
Along with the dowels and the shocking pens,
that were going to take all of the insides out,
we've got a few things we're going to add in.
First, I picked up a set of these other batteries.
I grab these at Harbor Freight.
This whole pack was about $4.
There's a lot of different varieties.
We're going to be using one of these smaller sizes.
The bigger ones won't be able to fit too well.
I also grab this cheap little flashlight.
It didn't even work when I bought it.
That's okay,
because all we want is the push button
on the inside of the flashlight.
We're going to be taking that out.
If you have a good way to buy those buttons individually,
that works too.
This just happened to be at the store
where I already was.
And then I also have a couple of varieties of wire.
This is some insulated wire
that I pulled out of some old Cat 5 cable,
and this right here is a decorative copper wire.
It has an enamel coating on it,
and that enamel coating is actually non-conductive.
You can scrape it away to get
to a conductive portion of the wire,
so this stuff works really well as enamel wire,
which is also weirdly hard to find.
Now, the reason we got additional batteries,
even though the shocking pens do come with some,
is that the batteries in the pens are really weak.
These pens are not very expensive,
and the batteries that come with them are pretty cheap.
They die quickly,
and I suspect that they don't have quite the voltage
that they're supposed to in the first place.
These batteries that I'm using are actually also fairly cheap,
but they definitely seem to have more of a charge
to them than the ones that come in the pen.
Time to break into our shocking pen,
and look at the electronics inside.
So this part just sort of twists off,
that's some metallic insides that just kind of get shredded
as we do that.
This plastic portion up here we're going to use part of
this down here,
we're not going to be using in there.
Glued together, so the easiest way to separate them...
Just to break through it.
That's okay because we didn't want this portion.
We're just going to be using this top bit.
So now this splits apart, we can see our insides.
Here's what we need.
There's this portion,
here which has all of our connection points
to the wires.
I'm actually going to be taking my gloves off.
The point of this thing is
that it gives off an electric shock,
and I want to be able to feel it to know
that I have it set up right.
If it's not working correctly, I need to know.
And easiest way to do that is just to touch the things,
and see if it's zapping me.
So let's take a look at this thing,
how it works.
So if I am touching this spring,
which is in contact with those batteries,
and I touch this end as well, it starts buzzing,
and you've, maybe heard my voice jump a couple of times
when I touched it by accident when I wasn't expecting it.
It's not that it's super painful.
It's just surprising when you're not ready for it.
So as long as I'm in contact
with this lead here and this lead here,
it gives me a nice little buzz.
We don't want it to be always on.
We want to add a switch, a button on the outside,
and that's why we have our tiny little flashlight here.
[Music]
This is why we got the flashlight.
It is for this tiny little switch.
It doesn't click on it off the same way as some switches.
It's just if you're holding down the button, it's on,
and that's exactly what we want.
We only want the electricity of the one to be connected
while we're pressing the button.
We are not going to be using the LED bulb,
so we can just clip that off.
There's our little button.
We'll have this red wire here going to our button.
We will take the spring off and attach it up here.
We'll have the wire
on the other side of our button going back,
touching the spring,
and then a second wire, coming off of that,
going out through our wand.
Those two will run all the way up to the tip of the wand,
and that's what we're going to use our shocking point.
We've got a couple of these pieces of the plastic case
that were inside of the pen,
and we actually do want to use those.
We just need to trim them down a little bit,
sort of the right size.
Now, these two,
the little pegs at the bottom, hold this all together...
It's very nice and compact.
That's something we can fit inside the handle of the wand.
One of the trickiest things about this whole setup is
how small we need to get everything.
We really need to compact it down quite a bit.
So I'm just going to do a little bit of wire bending
on these pieces right here to make everything fit
a little bit nicer.
So before this little plastic plate was facing straight up,
I have bent it back in and over again.
So you can see
that the wire is here are doubled around.
That's just going to keep everything a little bit shorter,
and that will make it
so we can fit inside the handle of our wand.
Our springs and our battery are in place.
So now, we're just going to take this cover,
and throw it back on.
That will stop our batteries from popping out
like they like to do.
All right.
This part is prepped.
Let's set that aside for a few minutes.
Get started on the want itself.
Right here, I have a 1/2 inch dowel.
We need to run wires through a portion of this.
We're going to cut it off, so it's about that long.
We're going to cut it in half lengthwise first though.
We want to be able to run wires in the inside of this dowel,
and carve out a channel,
and then glue it together around the wires.
[Music]
Now, we need to split it in the long way.
And to do that, we're going to use a band saw.
[Music]
Now, we want to choose a length.
I think that looks pretty good.
I'm going to cut that off right about here.
Because we use the bandsaw,
these two pieces fit really nicely together.
However, it does leave a little bit of tooth mark on the inside,
so we're just going to take some sandpaper,
and try and smooth that out a bit.
[Music]
And we want to cut a channel
all the way down the length of the whole thing,
and we can cut into one side or both sides,
either way works.
This split actually ended up being quite even,
and so I think we're just going to cut a little bit of a groove
into both of those.
There's lots of ways you could cut this groove.
You could use just a razor blade and a steady hand.
I'm going to try using a rotary tool.
I think it will be a little bit quicker and easier.
[Music]
What we need is a channel that's just big enough
for some of this wire.
Two strands of it,
and they come with two strands twisted together.
So that's just like...
To be able to fit down through the channel of the wand,
and now, a space that we can glue them together,
and have the size of the wood meeting up.
One other change we're going to do.
You can see
that I didn't take the channel all the way to the end of wood.
And that's because we don't just want a big open channel there.
We're going to add
two more smaller channels coming off of that,
and a little bit of the wire with the coating stripped off is
what's going to stick out from the top of those.
[Music]
Got our two lead wires.
However, these are just a little bit to stabby.
We don't want to be injuring people.
We're going to be shocking them,
but it's a light shock that's not supposed to really hurt.
So what we're going to do to round these out is we're going
to add a little drop of solder on to the tip of each one.
[Music]
Now, we need to glue this wire inside that channel.
[Music]
That should be plenty of clamps.
While that glue is drying,
let's work on some of the internal portions of our wand.
We've got the basic housing and battery set up,
and that's all going to fit inside of our handles.
So now we need to go about making that handle.
We're actually going
to drill a hole lengthwise down into the dowel,
and that's gonna be just large enough to fit
our electronics inside,
as well as working as a connection point
between the handle and the shaft of the wand.
With the hole drilled out into the larger dowel piece,
we can see that everything can now fit down inside.
That's exactly what we're going to need.
We do want to do a little bit of decorative work on the handle,
and we're actually going to do that right now.
Because it's going to end up thinning out parts of the top,
and we just want to make sure
that we have everything all complete,
and lined up just right.
It's gonna be a little bit easier
if we do this part first rather than after.
[Music]
All right, there's some decoration put on the handle.
I've seen some other people do some interesting stuff,
making their own Harry Potter wand handles,
where they use things like hot glue
or melted wax to add some other texture onto those.
If that's something you like doing,
by all means, you should go ahead and do that.
For this one,
I'm just going to use some sanding,
give it a little bit of shape and texture down at the bottom.
You can see I didn't do too much of the top.
That's because the walls up at the top
where I've drilled it out are fairly thin.
I didn't want to risk cracking or sanding
through the edges there.
So the top part is mostly untouched,
and I did quite a bit more texture down at the bottom.
Wingardium Leviosa.
Which is not going to work because the ones not done yet.
Time to do a little bit more soldering.
[Music]
Our button is going to go on the outside of the wand.
So we need to add some access points
for the wires to go through the side of the handle.
We're now using our smallest drill bit.
[Music]
Glue has had plenty of time to dry.
Now, we need to shape this little bit more.
Right now, it's just shaped like a dowel.
That's not very exciting.
So back to the belt sander.
I'm going to take some of these sides down,
make it a little more tapered.
There we go.
As I was tapering it,
I decided I kinda wanted to match the handle a little bit,
and it gave it a little bit of a spiral cut to it.
Kind of makes it look like a unicorn horn or something.
Okay.
So now we need to have
one of these two wires attaches to the spring,
and the other one of those wires attaches
to this green piece of wire here.
So let's clip everything shorter,
do some more soldering.
[Music]
All right. I gotta try something.
It's not going to feel good.
[Music]
That like causes a muscle in here
to just completely cease all at once.
Okay.
Last thing I want to do is just add a bit
of finishing color to this.
So it doesn't just look like plain pine,
so we're at least going to make it look a little bit snazzier.
[Music]
The wand is complete, and I have some volunteers.
I volunteered them
to participate in me testing this out.
Josh, how do you feel about that?
I feel great.
Yeah.
I feel like a victim.
Don't worry.
You can shock me with it too.
So, it's pretty simple.
There's a button,
and then these two leads have to make contact with the skin.
It's a little bit of a tingle.
And and it depends.
It changes a lot depending on where on your skin it is.
Yeah.
So I've had lots of times
where just like buzzes a little bit,
and then I've had times
where I feel it running all the way up through my fingers.
If I put it right here on my arm,
I can actually feel it buzzing.
It's nothing crazy like a taser or stun gun.
Exactly.
I didn't want something that was going to like injure people.
It's completely involuntary, isn't it?
Makes the muscles contracted.
Let's go for a right, right here.
[inaudible] on me.
I'm going to try one finger on,
and then touch the other side with my tongue.
[Music]
I can feel it in my finger and my tongue.
I don't feel it traveling the path between them.
All right.
But I have done it on my tongue.
Just one side on your tongue,
and the other side on Josh's tongue.
What?
No.
We're not going to try that.
Just kidding.
That's funny.
The trick of this is really engineering
everything to be small enough to fit inside the handle,
but it works,
and you can wave it around, and do magic spells.
Wingardium Leviosa.
It's Leviosa.
Wingardium Leviosa.
Made the camera float away.
I'm very talented wizard.
[Music]
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