This musical stuffed moose has gone silent. Can it be fixed?
Q: We have a 30-year-old moose that has a little push-button you can feel through the palm. When you press that button, the antlers have eight or 10 lights that flash and brief Christmas carols play. He's very plush, and the sentimental value is high. My 32-year-old daughter enjoyed him as a youngster, and now my grandchildren do, too. Or at least they did until he stopped working! The battery pack is in the back under a zipper and it looks good. The circuit runs through the arm and down to the palm, of course, and that's hidden. My hunch is it might be a loose wire there, but I haven't had the nerve to open it up. You'd have to slit the fabric and resew. It will take someone with more expertise than I possess to fix it. Can you help?
North Beach, Md.
A: Your hunch is undoubtedly correct: The problem is somewhere in the circuit. There are companies that repair plush animals, and some replace musical elements if they work via a windup key. But emails to many of these companies found none that will take on a rewiring job like the one you need. So, to repair your moose, you might need to piece together some steps.
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Build-A-Bear Workshop (buildabear.com), which has stores across the country, has made stuffed animals that work similarly to yours. Its Hal Moose, now discontinued but still available through websites such as eBay, has lights in its antlers and a push-button switch in a palm. While Build-A-Bear offers repair services for stuffed animals made in its stores, it doesn’t take on rewiring jobs, said the manager at the store nearest you, at the Westfield Annapolis Mall (410-897-0828). Nor does Build-A-Bear’s repair service work on stuffed animals without the company’s tag. However, if you brought in your moose, even if it isn’t from this brand, the staff would try to suggest the best seam for you to open up.
If you carefully snipped through a seam, taking care not to cut the fabric, you could pull out enough of the stuffing to inspect the wiring. If there’s a loose connection, that would be easy to fix. Or you might discover that everything looks fine but just doesn’t work. In that case, you could replace the components.
Invite by Voice in Eden Prairie, Minn., (invitebyvoice.com) offers an EZSound Box with a wired push-button switch and about a 200-second recording capacity for $13.99. You’d need to record your own snippets of Christmas carols, but that could be a fun family project, especially if your grandkids do the singing.
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Make Magazine has an article (makezine.com) on how to hack a stuffed animal to add features such as a pulsing heart that glows red. The article shows how to snip through a seam, snake wiring through an arm, and add a push-button switch and an LED light. If you’re handy, that might be all you need to figure out how to replace and rewire the lights on your moose.
If you have no experience with electrical wiring, a local “maker space” could probably help you. The Annapolis Makerspace offers get-togethers for folks interested in electronics and microcontrollers every Thursday from 7 to 9 p.m., for example.
If you get the music and lights working again but then despair of getting the moose stuffed and stitched back into fine shape, Martha Anderson, owner of Mar-Ke Mohair (teddybearrepair.com), a company in Midlothian, Va., that specializes in restoring collectible and antique mohair teddies and toys, would be happy to help. She has a minimum fee of $50 but sometimes waives it, assuming that only the stitching — not the fabric — was snipped open.
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