Evil mute meerkat with a squiffy eye

The voice recorder thing wasn't happy; every time I recorded something and played it back the output was almost inaudible. I thought perhaps the circuit wasn't man enough to drive the speaker down 1m of cable, so to test I tagged the circuit back together, but there was no improvement. Perhaps I'd knackered the piezo mic when prizing it from the case? I tried some other piezo pickups that I had. No luck.

OK, plan B: steal my daughters "spy pen" that has the same kind of recorder circuit, and hack that in instead. With a promise to buy her a new one I tested it and opened it up. I extended the speaker wires to the appropriate length to check, but no, it didn't like it either. There's no way I'm going to start farting around amplifying it (and I'm already in the dog house for pimping meerkats on a bank holiday weekend!), so out goes his voice box and Aleksandr's now a mute meerkat!

Nurse, scalpel please...

I decide to go in from the back:

My daughter really didn't like this shot:

Inside-out head; made me chuckle!

His head's like the TARDIS...

Easy! Easy! A steady hand needed for eye surgery:

Bit of a Terminator thing going on here...

Damn! Aleksandr has a wonky right eye! The drill bit must have gone in all squiffy like.

Some 18 SWG tinned copper wire wrapped around the servo and fed into the arms should help stabilise the servo and give it something to push against (as well as the stuffiing). As a bonus, Aleksandr gets posable arms.

Test fit of servo:

Oh, how I spend my time...