How to Remove Chips From All Types of Creative Tonies

I have made a lot of magic tonies, or tonies that have the chip from a creative tonie taken out and put in another design. The most common question I get is- how do I get the chips out without breaking them? The short answer is practice, but the long answer is that some are easier than others. My goal with this guide is to give you a head start, with pictures and ideas on how to get to these chips, and I give an idea of how easy they are to remove for each type of tonie.

Note, I’ve removed thousands of these chips. So when I give an idea of how hard it is for me to do, if you’re a beginner, you’ll probably break significantly more. I personally broke my first 2 chips on ones that I consider pretty easy to remove now. The goal of this guide is to give you a more informed starting point.

If you’re making these magic tonies for yourself, I don’t recommend getting all the same type of creative tonie. Then it’ll all look the same in your tonies app, and will make managing or updating them more time consuming and confusing. You are able to change the names of creative tonies in the advanced settings, but its a best practice to have them look different as well. Not necessary, but it helps.

Good chips and bad chips

There are 2 different types of chips that can be inside creative tonies. The ones that have copper on only about 1/3 of it, and one that has copper on most of it. The one with less copper is significantly more fragile. Not only is it more fragile, but they are also harder to solder back together if you break one. Can they still be removed? Yes. But even with all my experience taking them out, I’m about 24x more likely to break one with the bad chip (I actually did the math).

Universal steps for removing chips from all tonies

The first thing you want to do is to heat them up. I personally like to boil them. I’ve tried baking them, and they let off some nasty fumes. I don’t know how toxic that is, so do it at your own risk. Boiling them is the tried and true method. The chips in them are technically RFID tags, not an electronic chip, so water will not hurt the chips. I boil the creative tonies for 10-15 minutes before starting to work on them.

Note, if the chip isn’t coming out easily, do not try to pry it out. I just put it right back in the pot of boiling water and give it more time. The heat and water soften things up and usually they’ll come out. Using metal tools, like a screw driver or butter knife, to pry out the chips will significantly increase the likelihood that you’ll damage the chip.

Jumpsuit Tonie

This is the most common creative tonie. It’s not hard to get the chip or magnet out of this one. The other really nice thing with this is that there are a ton of different colors and different skin tones as well, which means there are around 20 different color options for this.

To remove the chip, carefully pry the face off the tonie after it has boiled about 10-15 minutes. Then, I like to squish the face to open up the void the chip is in to get them out. You don’t want to try to pry them out with anything metal. If I can’t get it out with my fingers, I put them back in the pot to heat them back up some more.

I break about 2% of these chips. (The all white, paintable ones I tend to break about 3% of those chips. I don’t know if they use more glue, or if the glue just adheres to the white plastic/rubber of the tonie better, but I tend to try to avoid them. That said, Target occasionally has this one on sale, so I will still buy them on occasion)

Yeti tonie

This one is occasionally on sale for a really good deal, and when that happens I always buy. This one is my favorite to get the chip out of. The head pops off and the chip is right there. That said, the glue can stick to the white more, and I will occasionally get some of the rubber of the Tonie that sticks to the chip as I remove it. That’s not a big deal.

The long body does make it a bit more challenging to get the magnets out though. It’s not super hard, but the long tubes are a bit more challenging. I use a longer screw driver to get them out, but it can often take a couple tries to get the magnets out. I always get the magnets out, but it adds a little bit of time.

As a professional I break about 1% of these chips.

Singer tonie

This is at the same time one of the easiest and yet still frustrating. This one has a little capsule that has the magnet and chip inside of it. The capsule only has one magnet, which is a little bit of a downgrade. Additionally, the magnets are also sometimes impossible to get out of the plastic capsule. After some practice, I can get about half of them out. That said, the magnets used in tonies is a 6mm x 6mm rounded magnet. They’re pretty cheap on amazon. All my designs use 2 magnets, so if I get this creative tonie, I plan to buy magnets for it, so I account for that when comparing costs. BUT if you don’t want to deal with magnets and chips, the capsule can be inserted into whatever you’re building, and that works pretty well. The finish isn’t as good as what I’m going for, but its good. To remove the capsule, simply pull it out using needle nose pliers after you’ve boiled it for about 10 minutes.

This is one you’re probably least likely to break. I don’t like them because it takes too much time to remove the chip from the capsule, and I like getting 2 magnets. Still, I’ve never broken one of these chips.

Santa tonie

This one also only has one magnet. The magnet is in a capsule, but the chip isn’t. This one isn’t terrible, but its not one of my favorites to do. The rubber is slightly softer than the jumpsuit tonie. Because of that, you don’t want to overcook these, or it’ll get almost too soft to work with. I’m also not a fan of it only having 1 magnet, and with it being in a capsule, I can’t use them in my designs unless I cut them out, and that’s a pain. I break about 2% of these.

Wizard

This chip is found inside the neck once you remove the head. This one also has softer rubber than the jumpsuit tonie, so you’ll want to avoid over cooking this one as well. Like the santa, this one also has a single magnet inside a capsule. I don’t usually buy these for that reason. I really like my 2 magnets. That said, this is one of the easier ones to remove. I’d say I only break about 1.5% of these.

Vampire

Like many of the others, the chip on this one is in the back of the neck once you take the head off. This one has a lot of good things going for it. It has the good chip, it has 2 magnets, and its not too terribly difficult to take apart. The challenging part of this one is that its got the softer rubber, and the rubber is black, so it absorbs the heat even more than the others. I often end up with lots of the rubber sticking to the chip when I remove them from these tonies. That said, I only break about 1.5% of these. They’re not my favorite, but I wouldn’t NOT buy them if they were on sale.

Hero

I am not a fan of the hero tonie. The body comes out in a couple of pieces, and the chip is embedded in the head. You are more likely to break these chips trying to dig them out of the head than you are with other tonies. I haven’t done many of these for that reason, and the ones I have done, I cut the head open to get the chip out, giving a lot of space around the chip to avoid damaging it. It took a lot of time, and its a higher risk tonie. I would probably avoid these ones. They’re not as bad as the tonies that have the other kind of chip, but I don’t think I’d buy these ones, even if they were on sale. I haven’t done enough of these tonies to give an idea, but I’d say I probably would break about 5% of these ones.