In the summer of 2004, there was an exhibit of automata at the Exploratorium, where I volunteer every month. I had heard of the old parlor automata - twittering birds and tin soldiers and such - but I had never seen modern automata before. This exhibit was from the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre, a group of British automatists. Check them out. (I particularly love the ones from the Fourteen Balls Toy Company.) These automatists build whimsical, often hilarious, mechanical "cartoons", populated with hand carved, hand painted protagonists and driven by complex, sophisticated, hand-built mechanics. This is fine technical craft, purely in the service of humor. I loved it.
So I got bitten by the bug: I simply had to try building one. I searched the web, I bought books, I schemed and plotted and planned. And luckily, Lisa's birthday was just a month away, adding that extra little bit of motivation I needed to get beyond the dreaming, and actually sit down and do it.
Here's a movie (and a few photos, below) of my first humble attempt, constructed mostly from a piece of nice plywood, along with dowels, sticks, brass tubing, wire, and glue. (The one pre-manufactured part that I used is the worm gear: it's from a plastic drywall anchor. It was simply too tempting -- and simply too perfect for the job -- to pass up.) Surprisingly (to me) I spent nearly as much time making drawings as I did actually building. My primary tools were a band saw, a hand drill, and a disc sander.
The finished product is referred to as The Little Man around the house, though the official title is Sisyphus in Training. Since these crank-operated automata inherently cycle through their action, I liked the idea of a task that's never finished, like Sisyphus and his stone. But I didn't want it to be purely grim, so I chose Sisyphus as a young man, in a more pastoral and relaxing posture (perhaps after a picnic), trying to swat a pesky fly. And always missing.
(If you're interested in learning more about mechanics and mechanical art, a very fruitful link is http://www.kugelbahn.ch. For automata links in english, see http://www.kugelbahn.ch/3_link_automata.htm. For a really cool site showing lovely kinematic models of slider cranks, go to http://kmoddl.library.cornell.edu/tutorials/01/. My favorite mechanical artist has got to be Arthur Ganson, who has always been a great source of inspiration for me.)
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