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The Shaker Board

I have used this device in several different ways over the years and it has always been one of the tricker-treaters favorites.  The shaker board is basically a board with rubber ball halves glued to bottom (this makes it kind of spongy feeling when you step on it).  A motor with an eccentric (off-center weight) is attached to one end and hidden by a tombstone.  When the unit is turned on, the whole thing vibrates.  This particular one has a pretty strong motor on it with a fairly large weight, so it vibrates fairly violently.  The kids love to stand on it!  I have set it up different ways over the years.  Sometimes I have put step pads on it, so that as soon as someone stood on it, it would start shaking and stop as soon as they stepped off.  Other years I have hooked it up to timers such as my P.E.T. and had it go on for 5 seconds and off for 10 seconds.

Click on the pictures below to see an enlarged view

  Here is a picture of the motor shaft with the off-center weight.

This picture shows the motor housing and the cover I keep over the shaft and off-center weight.

Another view of the motor housing.

I cover the whole thing with berlap to allow air to get the motor.

  Here is a front view of the shaker board with tombstone.

This is just to show you what I wrote on my tombstone.

This picture shows the ball halves attached to bottom of the board.  These are just your ordinary sponge rubber balls that you used to be able to get at every grocery store, but I found these at Party City.

To get the balls ready, cut them in half right on their seam.  After you get them cut (I used a sharp steak knife) coat the flat side with rubber cement.  Also coat the board, where you want to place the ball half, with rubber cement.  Let the rubber cement dry.  When it is dry, push the flat side of the ball onto the board in the desired location.  This holds very well in most cases.  The board above shakes so violently that I have had trouble with the balls sometimes coming off on this particular model, so you can see in the picture above that I tried some additional glue (liquid nails), but as you can see it pulls away from it and doesn't work.  So, now I just check the board occasionally and reattach the balls when necessary.

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Carl Cowley
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Revised: April 10, 2003

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Last modified: 09/26/07