How to Gator Clip an Audio Jack for Circuit Bending

Video Transcript

"AMANDA CLAIRE: So, one of the very basic things you might want to do with the toy, let's say you like the sounds it makes already and you don't necessarily want to bend it yet, maybe one of the first things you want to do is just put an audio jack in it so you can run it through your amplifier or your stereo or whatever it is. So that's what I've got here. I've actually already kinda stuck it on the cable. All right, there's our audio jack and this is a live cable. This is going into a guitar amplifier over there, so we just kinda put it on there. And now, what I've got here are--if you look at the speaker here, there are two terminals. Every speaker has two, sometimes three little contacts on it that go to these wires that are going to the circuit board. Well, what you can do is you can take your alligator clips and just clip it on those two terminals on the speaker and then you can take the other side of those clips and clip it on to the terminals of your jack here. And then once you've done that, then we can press a button and it's coming to the amplifier now. We don't have the amplifier very loud but it is all right. So now we've basically taken the sound that's going to that speaker and we've extended it into this jack. So I've done this with alligator clips. So what does that mean? That means if we remember what we've done, we can do it with wires, we can drill a hole in the case and install that jack permanently and just have very, very short little wires that go from the speaker to the jack and then the jack is installed in the case and then you just forget about it then you don't need the alligator clips at all, and then you've installed a jack and then you can use it that way with your amplifier."