admin

A visit to Per Helldorff

One day a video of an automaton made by Per Helldorff popped up on one of my Internet feeds. As Per explained when we eventually managed a visit, a previous visitor to his „mekaniske Kabinett“ made a video of his three-armed cup and ball trickster and quietly posted it onto YouTube (https://youtu.be/m9daxtL90XY?si=UqjMThCtTdzuSRQe) This went viral and, last time I looked, it had been viewed 1.3 million times. To his amazement, Per was then contacted by a Japanese TV network for permission to broadcast the video across Japan. He just wondered “how on earth did that happen?“

Per and his wife Anna live on a quiet crossroads in a tiny hamlet in the Swedish countryside. One room serves as the exhibition space and another as a small shop. Anna‘s nettle soup is legendary as one Swedish visitor told me – „we come here just for the soup“. We didn‘t come for the soup but to see Per‘s creations.

Per started by explaining his inspiration, showing us this historic wool skein counting machine. A woollen thread is wound onto the four arms as a handle is cranked. When the handle has been cranked a set number of times a wooden hammer hits the frame to signal that the required count has been reached. A royal Swedish edict from long ago specified severe punishment for anyone selling skeins of wool with less than the specified number of loops.

Looking closely at this old mechanism, two of the shafts have been carved to produce what Per called a „two-toothed cog“. This is a very pragmatic solution to slowly drive the large cogs. Using an „ordinary“ cog, a minimum of about 9 teeth is required to avoid the mechanism jamming. This traditional solution means that you can merrily work the crank on some of Per‘s automata and things happen at a considered, controlled pace.

Per‘s applause machine, or „a visit to the theatre“, is very popular as you can see in this video (https://youtu.be/OveTB2C0rp8?si=zQImbyJZIn_0tV9C) from one of the occasional courses that Per organises. Barry Falkner made his own version too (https://youtu.be/hW7V6__G1lQ?si=DD_NaFKeOQ4gsaMc).

Working together with Anna, Per explored the Geneva mechanism (https://youtu.be/vrK7kTY2NJo?si=ahe_1prgJNi-GcpU). Anna painted the pictures while Per worked on the mechanism.

Per has worked with wood since he left school. He didn‘t receive any training, he just learned it all by doing it himself. Now of course he’s a skilled craftsman. When an injury restricted what he could manage, that was when he moved towards automata making. His sense of humour and creativity really distinguish his work. He doesn’t do drawings so, when someone orders an existing automaton, patience is required while he copies the original in his workshop.

The English part of Per and Anna‘s website – https://www.helldorff.se/english

I mentioned that I knew of no other automata makers in Sweden and Per asked if I knew of Tomas Skimutis. I hadn‘t heard of him so another visit was now on the cards.

A visit to Tomas Skimutis

Tomas Skimutis decided to build his own gallery. Was he a master carpenter? Well no, he wasn‘t he worked in graphic design.

Things were a bit chaotic inside as preparations were in full swing for a summer exhibition.

Still Tomas was happy to show us around. His projects are very varied including small pieces of furniture, occasionally including electrical/electronic bits and pieces, here and there with a handle to turn.

This bird-helicopter combination was a lot of fun. Tomas pushed a button to make it descend slowly down from the rafters. There is a crank to turn the helicopter blades, but you have to detach the lifting wires to allow the rotor to spin.

Opening the bird‘s chest reveals more secrets, such as the two small bottles of Swedish liquor stored inside. Not constrained by any rules or specifications, Tomas just added whatever he felt like and who can argue with that!

Another piece shows a contestant in a dancing competition twirling in front of a judge. This is hand-cranked but includes music from some sort of electronic player and some flashing lights to show the score.

This detail from a much larger piece shows a man up in the attic listening to wax cylinder recordings. Pushing a button starts both the music and the movement of the man‘s arm as he cranks away.

As we had simply rolled up unannounced, although we saw quite a bit, a lot of things were not yet on display. Tomas promised that there would be lots more when his exhibition opens this summer 2024. If you can‘t make it, take a peek at the videos on this page http://www.skimutis.com/5/5.html and get ready to be amazed.

Website http://www.skimutis.com

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/tomas.skimutis

Long, long ago, as a 10 year old boy in in the sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, my pals and I used to sing Brahm’s lullaby (Wiegenelied) every night before the lights were turned out and we were then supposed to sleep. Imagine my delight when, many years later, I found a music box that played this tune. I have never had problems sleeping, but I had learned the centuries old idea that counting sheep is supposed to help you to nod off. Put these two parts together and I had the basics for an automaton, for a Shleep Machine.

The Sheep

Carving woolly sheep seemed like a lot of work to me, so I improvised by using a scroll saw to cut some cloud shapes out of plywood. Glue three clouds together with 3 mm dowel for legs, add an egg for a head with a leather shoelace for ears and a sheep is born.

The Mechanism

I used some old Meccano gears that I found in my junk box to join the external crank to the vertical axle in the centre. Turning the crank makes the axle rotate. I inserted the music box mechanism between the crank and the gears to play Brahms’ music as the sheep go round and round.

I attached a wooden disc to the vertical axle with five slots cut into the disc – one for each sheep. Bent brass rod then forms a very simple hinge for the connecting arm to each sheep. Each connecting arm passes freely through a small wooden egg which serves as a wheel. As the centre axle turns, the wheels keep the sheep high enough so that their feet don’t drag on the surface. As each sheep approaches the gate, there is a bump in the path of the wooden egg, which makes the sheep jump up and over the gate.

The Sheepdog

Sheep are often looked after by a sheepdog. In this case the sheep are extraordinarily well-behaved, always going round and round precisely the same circle. This is very boring for the poor dog, who is left with nothing better to do than to chase his own tail. This is not connected to the main mechanism, so you have to give the red and white ball a twirl to start the action.

Reflections

No one has yet fallen asleep while using this, so I guess that it makes it a failure. As a ten year old boy the song was usually successful in getting me to drop off. I suppose the nurse turning the lights off helped too. Maybe I’ll try that next time someone has a go with my Shleep Machine.

The Video

The Images

https://www.wordwise.de/ShleepArchive.zip

My idea for this small seductress started life as someone chatting away on a mobile phone until she eventually metamorphosed into a musical mermaid. Along the way she lost her body, gained a tail and took on an unhealthy pallor. My first idea remains – of having the largest mouth possible, simply operated by a lever. Two additional levers permit her to wave enticingly as she sings her siren song to lure unwary sailors into sea wreck and ruin. Although we can’t see what she is wearing beneath the waves, a stylish starfish keeps her hair in check and some fishy earrings show her status as queen of the surf.

For a change, there is no handle to crank to make a fixed sequence of events happen. Instead there are three levers and it is entirely up to the user to decide what happens in which order. The challenge is to think of a suitable song, sing it yourself and, as you sing it, to manipulate the levers for best effect. I was encouraged by recently spotting Puppets in Prague talking about table-top puppets. While my figure is not as sophisticated as Mirek Trejtnar’s, real mermaids do not actually have any legs, so I felt it was legitimate to hide all of the complicated bits out of sight under the water. Not that it is complicated, it is quite simple really and it did not take too long at all to make. Maybe there are ideas here which you could use in your next project?

Making the Head

As wooden eggs are egg-shaped, it helps a lot if you first carefully drill a hole in the base and then glue a piece of dowel in it. As dowel has straight edges, the 10 mm diameter dowel shows the orientation of the 50 mm long egg much more clearly. The dowel is much easier than the egg to clamp firmly in a vice, thus holding everything steady while drilling and sawing.

However, before cutting the egg diagonally to make a mouth, I drilled a 6 mm hole through the dowel and into the egg. This hole will then take the pusher rod which opens and closes the mouth. Also before cutting, I drilled two 2 mm holes horizontally through the egg. One to take the brass rod which hinges the two parts of the head together and the other to take a brass rod which hinges the pusher rod that come up through the dowel.

The jaw is held quite still by the neck dowel. Making the mouth the full width of the head and moving the upper head instead of the jaw means that the movement is accentuated and everything is more dramatic, larger than life.

The pusher rod is attached to the upper part of the head via a simple hinge. The horizontal rod passes through the loop in the end of the pusher rod, thus making a connection which can both push up and pull down. The pusher rod passes through a generous hole in the dowel so that, as the head rises and tilts back, taking the loop with it, there is enough play to prevent the pusher rod from jamming.

Making the Base

A 10 cm diameter base seemed about right and a chunky piece of dowel serves well as shoulders with a 10 mm hole for the neck.

To allow the nymph’s arms to rise up out of the water, 4 mm slots provide plenty of space for the arms made of 2 mm plywood. The ugly slots are largely hidden by gluing waves right in front of them.

The arms hinge on 2 mm brass rods and, once assembled, they need a bit of fine tuning to make sure that the levers apply force in the right direction i.e. upwards but also slightly outwards.

In the miscellaneous parts photo you can see three levers: one to push the right arm up, one with a slot to open the mouth and one to push the left arm up.

A small wooden sphere glued to the rod allows the slotted lever to push up and open the mouth.

Once fully assembled, a second small wooden ball prevents the rod from slipping out of the slot.

The levers to raise the arms are a bit simpler, they just push on the elbow and rely on gravity to pull the arm down.

Reflections

Our mermaid started off with pearl earrings. At first, that seemed quite maritime chique, but wasn’t very interesting once I had painted things. Replacing pearls with fish made her much more mermaidy, even permitting some colour coordination with the starfish.

While generally enthusiastic, my first eight year-old tester complained that the mermaid’s hair was too short. Mermaids are usually shown with long, flowing locks. I’m afraid that my mermaid has opted for a more sensible, modern, easy-care cut.

Video

Images

Download available under https://www.wordwise.de/MermaidArchive.zip

My small friend’s birthday was due and I thought it about time to make her a simple automaton of her own. There is an owl on her school rucksack so I decided to make an owl for her desk. Owls are famous for being able to turn their heads through a wide range, which meant that I didn’t have to think too long about the required movement. I found a couple of nice examples on the Internet, two from Carlos Zapata (one older http://carloszapataautomata.blogspot.com/2012/01/small-barn-owl.html and one newer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcnn2QUscbY&t=20s) and one from Paul Spooner (https://cabaret.co.uk/product/the-owl-and-the-pussycat-by-paul-spooner/). This owl is not disagreeing with anything in particular, it’s just keeping its eyes peeled for any juicy mice in the vicinity.

Design Constraints

Intended for an eight-year-old, it has to be safe, robust and easy to operate. That’s why I rejected brass rods in favour of chunky wooden dowel. It is also why I broke a habit and didn’t put a red ball on the end of the crank handle, just painting it red instead.

Making the Owl

After making a model owl in plasticine, for the body I chose a suitably sized piece of limewood and marked the outline onto two sides. As the owl’s body leans forward, the cut between the head and the body has to be tilted so that it will be horizontal when the body is held in its tilted position by the legs.

A scroll saw will cut out the basic shape.

As you can see, the first set of cuts remove the side markings, so you have to redraw them on the surfaces which are now curved.

For the shaft which turns the head, It is a good idea to drill the holes while two faces of the body are still parallel to one another, that means before making the second set of cuts along the markings which you had to redraw on the curved surfaces.

When carving, the bottom of the head and the top the body must be cut to a circle with the same radius so that, as the head is turned, nothing protrudes outside of the body.

An 8 mm diameter dowel is fixed to the head and passes freely through 8.5 mm holes in the body and the top of the base box to the drive wheel fixed to the bottom of the dowel. A couple of chunky steel washers increase the weight, pushing the drive wheel more firmly down onto the two cams.

Making the camshaft

I used 8 mm dowel for the camshaft and the handle to crank it. The two cams mounted onto the shaft are identical, taking turns to move the drive wheel via friction. Either one or the other of them is always in contact with the drive wheel so that the owl’s head stays more or less at a constant height, just rotating – first one way and then the other. A small piece of 3 mm dowel pins each cam onto the camshaft.

To keep it simple, I placed the cams close to the side of the base, just separated from the walls by nylon washers, ensuring ease of movement.

Looking at the base, you can see that the cams rub against the outer edge of the drive wheel. The transmission ratio here is about 1 to 1 so that the owl’s head turns by about 180° before it changes direction. If the cams were positioned closer to the centre, it would be possible for the head to turn by more than 180°. Owls can apparently turn their heads through 270 degrees, but I was happy with about half a turn, limited by a 3 mm dowel pin inserted into the outer edge of the drive wheel. When this pin touches either side of the base, it prevents further rotation.

Making the Handle

In the past, I have put a ball on the end of the handle and arranged for it to slip freely when rotated. This time I thought “forget the ball” and make the handle itself slip freely. Both ideas mean that you do not have to let the handle slip through your fingers as you turn it. It’s a small thing but it does make things a bit easier to use.

I don’t have a lathe, so I used my hand-held battery-powered drill to rotate the 8 mm diameter handle and a small round file to add a groove near to the end. A piece of 3 mm dowel inserted into the crank prevents the handle from being pulled out, while allowing it to turn freely.

Thoughts on Friction

Relying on friction between the cams and the drive wheel means that no toothed cogwheels are required. It also means that small hands can grab the owl’s head and turn it without any damage occurring. The drawback is that friction also occurs everywhere that a moving part is in contact with a still part such as where the dowel linking the drive wheel to the owl’s head passes through the base and through the owl’s body. These points are essentially the bearings needed to keep the dowel properly aligned. If the bearings are too loose, the dowel and thus the drive wheel will tilt and not turn so easily. If the bearings are too tight, the dowel will be stiff and may not turn when required.

My pragmatic approach is to start with tight holes for bearings, enlarging them as required when tests show that the movement is too stiff. For instance, for my 8 mm diameter dowel I first drilled 8.5 mm holes for the bearings, enlarging one of them to 9 mm after trying out the mechanism. Increasing the weight via washers increases the friction where it is wanted, between the cams and the drive wheel.

Video

Images

Download images from  https://www.wordwise.de/Archive_of_owl_images.zip

What’s the idea?

Ever since I visited Probošt’s Christmas Crib in the Czech Republic a few years ago and saw the model wooden conveyor belt (https://youtu.be/s4F3INnuzLk) exhibited there, I wanted to have a go at making my own version. I decided to cheat a bit and avoid the complexity and size of making a completely wooden chain. The top of my version is completely solid, with an uninterrupted smooth surface for figures to glide along, propelled by an invisible, magical force. This magical force also gives the figures a spin as they move around. We all know about flying saucers hovering in the sky and these are their earthbound counterparts – Flying Teacups, which have a cosy hole in the top for plug-in figures to nestle in.

The magical bit

The magic comes from small neodymium alloy magnets. These are widely available and have a really strong magnetic field. Mucking about with a couple to see what their limits are, I found that, even when separated by a sheet of plywood, they are still very strongly attracted to one another. I was also happy when I found that when turning one of them through 90° (from horizontal to vertical) they maintained the attraction with a twist. The twist was that when I dragged the vertical one along beneath my sheet of plywood it not only pulled its horizontal mate along on top of the sheet, it also made it rotate. Magic!

The Chain

To drive the figures endlessly round and round, I needed a chain, like a bicycle chain, to be driven by a cog. Here is my finished chain –

The chain is made of some strong polyester cord and pieces of dowel.

First I cut 24 pieces of 20 mm diameter dowel to the same size, about 15 mm high. Then I drilled a hole to take the polyester cord. To be able to properly glue the cord, I then cut the dowel in half. This means that I could apply glue along the drilled hole to fix the cord. The cord outside of the dowel remains free from glue and stays flexible.

In every third piece I also drilled a 10 mm diameter hole for a magnet.

While the glue dried, I used a small clamp to press the pieces together. The spacing of the recesses in the cogs defines how long the free piece of cord needs to be.

The Cogs

The cogs are cut from two pieces of 8 mm plywood glued together for a total thickness of 16 mm. The 10 cutouts are 20 mm arcs into which the pieces of dowel fit. Here, the chain is not transmitting force to second cog to make it turn anything. This means that the second cog could have been just a smooth disc instead. The useful force is transmitted via the magnets embedded in the chain.

The Pinwheel Gears

Two pinwheel gears are needed. The large, 32 pin, gear is glued to the back of one of the cogs. The small, 12 pin, gear is mounted vertically and is turned by the external crank handle.

The Three Oval Pieces

The three oval pieces all have the same outer shape.

The middle oval has a round hole cut in it which allows the large pinwheel to turn easily.

An axle is required for each cog. The right-hand one is fixed and provides a bearing for the large pinwheel gear and its attached cog. The left-hand one is moveable to allow the chain tension to be adjusted.

There are 6 dowel spacers to hold the top oval, leaving just enough space for the chain to move easily while preventing the magic dowel pieces from twisting when pulled upwards by a magnet in the base of a teacup.

In the bottom view, on the right you can see the large pinwheel gear which is glued to the right-hand cog. Turning the gear turns the cog which moves the chain. On the left you can see the adjustable axle for the left-and cog.

Sliding the adjustable axle to the left increases the tension in the chain. This is handy for the initial set-up as well as later on to correct for any stretching of the chain.

A piece of chunky 40 mm diameter dowel serves to join the top assembly to the base together with the crank assembly at the right-hand end. Now you can see how the small pinwheel gear engages with its larger brother. With no teacups in place everything moves quite freely. Each teacup added increases the friction, but the gear ratio of 12 to 32 keeps the force needed to turn the crank down to a sensible level.

The Teacups

The teacups are made from 40 mm diameter balls cut in half. In the top there is a 17.5 mm hole to plug in a figure. In the bottom a 10 mm hole holds a neodymium alloy magnet. The teacup’s handle is made of 3 mm plywood.

Add some nice vertical stripes to emphasise the spinning motion and a teacup is ready.

I chose not to paint the main structure for practical reasons. Even though the magnets have a smooth surface, dragging the teacups around the surface will inevitably result in abrasion. Scratching off a painted surface would not look good. If the marks left on the bare wood bother me in future, I can always sand them off.

The Figures

I have a collection of plug-in figures from previous projects, all with a standardised base to plug in to a 17.5 mm diameter hole, thus fitting nicely into the teacups. It’s quite handy being able to reuse “characters” like this. You can then mix and match as you like.

Changes

I had originally planned to use a small music mechanism.

When I tried it, I didn’t like the music and it seemed a bit superfluous. So I simply left it off, leaving a small, now unused, cog behind the small pinwheel gear. That’s life isn’t it? You start off with a certain idea and in the end, less is more.

Reflections

The finished item looks quite simple and clean. Placing teacups and plugging in a collection of animals gives it more character. If you turn the crank handle very quickly a teacup can be thrown out of its magnetic connection and cause a traffic pile-up. That is a plus point to me as it makes it more interesting to use. Also, getting the speed just right can cause some teacups to resonate and spin at an amazing speed which is fun too. Sometimes figures just stare straight ahead, waiting for some impulse to start spinning. It’s nice and chaotic.

It works surprisingly well and I can think of loads of other ideas which could use a similar mechanism. For a lark, I turned the entire thing up on end and I could successfully transport teacups vertically up and down. There is an old English nursery rhyme called Hickory Dickory Dock and from that I can imagine making a mouse run up and down a clock. Processions of figures often appear in old public clocks, coming out of one door and disappearing through another. And so on.

Instead of using polyester cord, I could have used tape instead. Tape as wide as the dowel pieces’ height might resist twisting more and be better for other projects.

If spin is not needed then turning the magnets in the chain through 90° to be parallel to their counterpieces in the cups would stop the rotation.

Download

https://www.wordwise.de/Flying_Teacups_Archive.zip

Video

In the Sep-Oct issue 2022 of Automata Magazine we showed you Animals in Orbit. As the number of animals has increased over time here in Berlin, this has caused a queue of visitors all waiting for their turn up in orbit.

So, instead of them just joining the lengthening queue to go into orbit, I thought that I would keep them amused by making a seesaw. Yet another way to bring movement to what are otherwise fairly static characters.

New Animals

Amongst other interesting new visitors, this friendly bee flew in one day out of my wife’s bonnet and decided to stay.

This curious animal is a rare specimen of the teapoticus nervosus, commonly known as the nervous teapot. Lifting its red knob raises the lid to let light right in, often dazzling the poor creature.

So what’s the brief?

For a change, I thought that I would avoid using a box as the base and instead I went for a flat base whilst still opting to turn a small handle to create the up and down motion. To keep the seesaw low, this meant putting the crank mechanism off to the side, with a long linkage to push and pull the short lever between the supports for the seesaw.

Making

The plug-in “seats” for the animals are the same as for Animals in Orbit, just with a different paint job. A wild black and white spiral pattern draws attention to how the movement is produced.

The important bit is the “crankshaft” which transforms the rotary motion from turning the red-headed lever into a to-and-fro movement for the stripey connecting linkage.

Here you can see that I used 3 mm dowel pins and corresponding holes to locate the four sidepieces. Using pins like this means that I can put it together and take it to pieces as often as needed to ensure that the movement is correct. It also means that flashy paintwork is easier to do before parts are permanently glued in place, sometimes getting in the way of masterful brushstrokes!

Reflections

Ultimately it is the passengers who bring this to life. With no one having fun it is a dull spectacle. It looks best when the animals look at one another, just as in real life, perhaps goading one another to seesaw even higher or even faster. The mechanism is pretty simple and, as usual, the bright red knob shows you what to turn to bring things to life. For small friends who come to visit, Animals in Orbit has become quite a favourite and now, together with this seesaw, the possible permutations and combinations of which figure goes where seem to be endless, and no one has to get bored standing in the queue with nothing to do.

Images to Download

https://www.wordwise.de/Seesaw_archive.zip

Video

The Idea

The way that groups of fish move together has always interested me (flocks of birds too, but that is another story). Occasionally I see underwater nature TV programmes which show how a school of fish move like synchronised swimmers or a group of ballet dancers moving together across a stage. I found one definition of a “school” as a shoal of fish swimming in the same direction to then suddenly all change direction at the same time. My question was – how do they do that? Is it telepathy? Is there a sergeant-major fish who yells “about turn!” So I thought why don’t you make yourself a school of fish and see how you can make it “school”, or dance yourself.

Inspiration

Before making anything, I always have a look around hyperspace, to see how others approach the same challenge. It’s boring to simply copy someone else’s work, but seeing what approach they take and how the finished item works out is always an education and often an inspiration. Entering “fish automata” into a search machine, I found quite a few matches. Two impressed me in particular: one with just a nice single fish by Carlos Zapata (https://cabaret.co.uk/fish-2012-by-carlos-zapata/) and another quite complex one with a big school of fish by Matt Smith (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGaj_KlXFqs).

Approach

Trying to keep things as simple as possible, I thought maybe I could use a cam to make the fish wiggle. I then decided to let the operator choose in which direction the fish should swim instead of automating a fixed routine of direction changes. Simply turn the crank one way to swim left and turn the crank the other way for the fish to swim right. The operator of the automaton then becomes the choreographer for our fish ballet school.

Drawings

I used the Graphic app on my computer to produce scale drawings. This took up most of the time as I kept modifying things as I noticed where bits might bump together, or where gravity might pull parts in the wrong direction. It is hard to follow drawings which you didn’t draw yourself, but together with the photos they should make some sense.

For the drawings I used a different colour for each moving part.
– The yellow part is the crankshaft which is turned by the operator.
– The red, green and blue parts each carry two fish at the top (not shown).
– The brown part (the wiggler) holds the stops which limit the movement of the red, green and blue discs.
– The grey parts are fixed and don’t move.
As the camshaft is turned, the three yellow wheels drive the red, green and blue discs, turning them until they encounter the stops on the wiggler.

The top view follows the same colour scheme but doesn’t show the crankshaft or the box. The grey circles represent wooden hemispheres which act as lengthened bearings for the brass rods, which each hold two fish. I thought these looked like upside down octopus so, to reinforce the effect, I added a 3 mm thick set of arms to each one, which accounts for the odd, grey star shapes. The six small brown circles in the wiggler show the 3 mm dowels which protrude downwards to act as stops, limiting the rotation of each coloured disc.

The side view shows the yellow cam responsible for wiggling the fish, four times per rotation. The brown part is hinged at the bottom and a free-running wheel ensures smooth movement as the cam turns. Imagine the cam pushing the wheel and thus tilting the brown part outwards, towards the front of the base. This moves the stops towards the front. The low points on the cam allow the stops to move back towards the rear, encouraged by a spring (not shown).

The fishy, yellow part to the right is part of the external crank which the operator turns.

Templates

One of the advantages of producing drawings is that you can print out and then cut out templates, which speeds up things in the workshop.

Base – top

This is what the underside of the top looks like.

The purpose of the hemispheres is to lengthen the bearings (holes) in which the long brass rods sit. The rods must turn easily in the bearings but should stay vertical. Longer bearings keep the rods straighter whilst still allowing them to turn freely.

Brass rods to hold the fish

Here are the large discs responsible for turning the fish with pieces of dowel protruding from the edge which restrict the amount of turn, when they hit the stops on the wiggler. The long brass rods are carefully fixed, vertically, into the discs using two-component epoxide adhesive.

The camshaft

The camshaft has two identical cams at each end and, between them, there are three drive wheels, each driving one of the discs on the end of a brass rod.

The wiggler

This strange looking thing holds the stops to restrict the rotation of the large discs. It is hinged near the bottom of the base and the spring pulls it against the two identical cams. As the cams turn they move this gently forwards and backwards. The slight movement of the stops causes the large discs to move a little, which in turn make the fish wiggle a little. It is the wiggler.

The assembled mechanism

When assembled, the stops on the wiggler are positioned so that they can catch the protruding dowels in the edges of the large discs. For each disc there are two stops. One restricts clockwise movement, the other counterclockwise movement.

The fish

I carved the fish from lime wood and added fins made of 3 mm plywood. After cutting each fish into four pieces, I used a fretsaw to cut a slot upwards in each piece, making space for a piece of flexible tape. Some careful gluing later and the fish wiggle in quite a fishy way. Two fish are mounted onto each brass rod using two component epoxy resin adhesive.

The painted base

Some underwater vegetation builds on the aquatic atmosphere, as does carving the supports to hinge the wiggler as clams. My clams have eyes which makes them a species as yet unknown to science. As the spring is not fixed here, gravity pulls the wiggler away from its intended working position.

Final assembly & reflections

For this project, with an eye on future repairs, I chose to not glue the box together. Instead I used 3 mm dowel to pin the parts together while doing the fine tuning and painting. Once painted, I used brass screws to more permanently hold things together. Making things of wood is great, but wood does react to the moisture levels in the air. This has occasionally caused some of my fully glued creations to jam up, and repair then means having to destroy certain parts and then remake and repaint them.

Leaving the box without a front or back wall leaves the mechanism clearly visible for the many curious.

This looks quite complex, but there is not much to it with just a few moving parts. I now even suspect that one cam would probably have been enough to move the wiggler, making it even simpler.

When my seven-year-old quality control expert tried it out, she played happily with it for quite a long time. It is not really child-proof as the temptation to grab a brightly coloured fish and move it yourself is almost irresistible for small hands. The 2 mm diameter brass rods are fine for adults, but children would need something much more substantial. The fish are also not terribly robust. We will see what time shows. Other makers have used wire rings to join the fish segments together. Maybe that would be a bit sturdier.

Video

Download

Here are the images compressed for download. https://www.wordwise.de/Fish_archive.zip

We have had a lot of weather recently and here is a little more. At least with this version, you won’t get wet feet.

Inspiration

The other day, a young friend of mine gave me a present, a beautiful picture of a rainbow. This made me wonder whether anyone had tried to make a wooden weather automata. A quick search found one match (https://oldchapelgallery.co.uk/product/wooden-automata-rain-machine/) “Wooden Automata Rain Machine” made by Ian McKay.

This suggested using a crankshaft to make the raindrops move up and down and I thought, “I’ll go for that” but, along the way, I decided to embellish the design with a rainbow, a sun, a cloud and ultimately a small bird.

Making

A rainbow is a simple geometric exercise and I chose to have 6 colours. As a boy I learned Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain to name the sequence of seven colours in the rainbow, red, orange, yellow, green, indigo and violet. I have never understood the difference between indigo and violet, so I decided to drop indigo leaving just six colours.

The cloud was fun. Cotton wool is often used to suggest clouds but I have a good collection of wooden balls.

So, with some sanding and gluing, I could make a cartoonish sort of cloud which was just right.

After a bit of painting, I used some 4 mm dowel to glue the cloud firmly to the rainbow. This meant that I could hold the cloud in a fixed attitude and could drill four parallel holes for the raindrops.

I then drilled matching holes in the base, as well as a hole up through the rainbow for the 4 mm dowel which holds the sun up in the sky.

For the movement, I used a piece of brass rod and bent it using pliers, sliding on some drilled 4 mm dowel pieces as bearings before adding the next bend. The four bearings are roughly at 0°, 90°, 180° and 270° so that each raindrop seems to move out of phase with the others.

You can see that the crankshaft also turns a wheel at the left. This wheel will friction drive the hemisphere attached to the bottom of the dowel holding the sun.

After adding bearings made of drilled pieces of dowel to the bottom of the raindrop rods, I attached linkage rods to the crankshaft before fitting it all together and fixing the ends into the bearings by adding a final bend.

To stop the bearings from slipping out of their respective brass loops, I then added a drop of two-component epoxy resin glue to the outside of each bearing.

Mistake 1 – Moving Holes

When I did my trial assembly I found that I had made the linkage rods too short and the mechanism jammed. Once I recognised the problem, I had to move the holes in the right hand side and in the internal partition down 10 mm. To move a hole, you fill the old hole with a suitably thin piece of dowel (first making the hole bigger if necessary) and then drill a new hole.

Mistake 2 – Cloud Too Thin

Once everything moved smoothly, I found that the rod for the right hand raindrops kept falling out of the cloud. When I made it longer, it then poked out of the top of the cloud on the up stroke. I thought about inflating that end of the cloud by the addition of a new ball, but then decided to add a small bird, calmly flying high up, towards the sun, thus keeping its feet nice and dry.

This was then a case of serendipity and not a mistake at all! Isn’t it fun just making things up as you go along!

The Video

URL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH0Ha5dDb-g

The Images

https://www.wordwise.de/Wooden_Weather_Archive.zip

What was the idea?

There is a range of small wooden figures widely offered for sale for young families with each figure sitting on a standardised piece of 17 mm diameter dowel. There is then a matching range of bases with 17.5 mm diameter holes into which the figures can be plugged. Apart from the plugging and unplugging, this is a very static affair so I decided to add some movement and open up a whole new world, to boldly go where no turkey has gone before. I also find that the commercially available, mass-produced figures are a bit too simple, restricted as they are by the low price that parents are traditionally willing to pay for them. I like to take a few hours to carve each small figure which presumably makes them commercially unviable, but hey, I make things for fun, not money.

The movement

A 15 cm plywood disc serves as the base. It has four supports for the lid and a central bearing which allows the vertical spindle to turn freely. Turning the crank rotates the drive wheel on which a disc rests which is attached to the vertical spindle. Friction means that when the drive wheel is turned, it causes the disc to turn, rotating the vertical spindle.

This very simple mechanism is extended by the addition of two wooden cogs. One is glued to the cranked shaft and the other is fixed to a small music box mechanism. This arrangement means that when the handle is cranked the wheel turns and the cogs also turn to produce a merry tune. The music box mechanism uses a ratchet to drive its music drum. Turned the “wrong” way, the ratchet simply clicks harmlessly now and then and no music is produced.

The vertical spindle is glued to a disc which is friction-driven round and round. The spindle passes freely through the middle of another 15 cm disc above which both a 67 mm hemisphere and sphere are fixed. The hemisphere is used to fix the arms holding the figures and, with a lick of paint, the sphere looks like our planet Earth.

The five arms are made of 8 mm dowel attached to 40 mm hemispheres with a 17.5 mm hole drilled in the centre. Stretch your imagination a little and these could be flying saucers.

The Animals

The Video

Link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVyCAvw8i4U

Reflections

This is a fairly simple carousel with music. The ability to change the passengers makes it more interactive, especially for kids who like to put their own slant on things. I can carve as many figures as I feel like as they can always form an orderly queue to wait for their turn for a ride. Apart from the five flying saucers there is also one prime position right on top of the world.

Downloadable Images

https://www.wordwise.de/Animals_images.zip

In 2021, I visited La Rochelle, an attractive seaside town on the Bay of Biscay in France. After a delicious lunch in one of the waterside restaurants, I popped into the Musée des Automates & Modèles Réduits (Museum of Automata and Scale Models – https://museeslarochelle.com) to take a look at their collection.

This museum opened to the public in 1984, with more than 30 years of work by the museum’s original creator, Michel Gaillard, to build up this collection. In addition to some prestigious antique pieces (for example made by Jouets et Automates Français (JAF), or Decamps …), there are some large animated displays. There are apparently more than 300 moving figures: mostly antique, with some animated window displays and historical scenes. I thought that I would share just a few impressions of what’s on offer.

Here is part of a reconstruction of the “Montmartre” district of Paris, which is used as a setting for some of the automata from the first part of the 20th century.

One of the shop windows shows a French butcher’s shop, with an automaton which I guess was used for advertising in the days before television took over the job. It reminded me of a modern work by Paul Spooner “Little Reinhold’s Wonderful Sausage Machine”.

It’s fun to speculate what this piece “Groom de service” made by JAF in 1923 was used for. I imagined it on the counter of a bar serving plates of salted snacks to keep the customers thirsty.

Of course there was a magician.

This work made me wonder a bit. It’s an automaton showing an automaton-maker at work. Its title loosely translates as “Vauconson making his famous mechanical duck. I took a quick peek in Wikipedia to find an article in French about a digesting or defecating automaton duck, created by Jacques de Vaucanson around 1734.

Here is a link to an automated translation of the French Wikipedia article https://translate.google.com/website?tl=en&u=https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canard_de_Vaucanson&sl=fr for those interested in defecating ducks.

This clown balancing on a ladder together with a pig balancing a ladder on its nose, was made in 1895 by another famous automatist called Leopold Lambert. Follow this link https://mus-col.com/en/the-authors/10280/ for a short biography.

It was an interesting visit for me even though I know nothing about antique automata. The entrance fee also includes a visit to the adjacent museum which has a collection of model ships and a model railway setup.

The museum is within walking distance of La Rochelle town centre at 12-14 rue de la Désirée, 17000 La Rochelle

Other Automata Museums in France

If you search for “musée des automates”, you will find several matches in France.

• The Musée des automates in Lyon https://museeautomates.com/
• La Magie des Automates in Lans-en-Vercors https://www.magiedesautomates.fr
• Musée des automates in Falaise https://www.automates-avenue.fr
• MUSÉE de l’Automate Souillac https://www.musee-automate.fr

I will certainly be popping in to see what they have to offer, the next time that I am in the vicinity.

Images

Download the images from here https://www.wordwise.de/La_Rochelle_Images.zip

The Idea

I was poking around a museum shop in Denmark and I came across a splendid elephant designed by Kay Bojesen and made of oak. There are images of this classic product on the Rosendahl web site. I thought that it would be fun to have a go at making my own elephant with some interesting movement. My elephant would have to be able to pick things up with its trunk and of course it would have to be able to fly. I did think about Dumbo-style ears but on consideration I thought that was a bit far fetched. How can an elephant possibly fly by flapping its ears? Instead of that, my elephant has a very modern howdah strapped to its back which contains the mechanism to drive a high efficiency helicopter-like propeller. As usual, there is a crank protruding from the back of the howdah to get things moving.

Technical Requirements

The trunk should be rigid, operated by unkindly pulling our poor elephant’s tail. To help her to pick things up a magnet is required in the end of her trunk. The propellor should be friction driven to make it less likely that over enthusiastic admirers can break parts such as a pin wheel. This friction drive should work even if the elephant is up side down. We don’t want to risk a dangerous power loss during aerobatic manoeuvres.

Making the Elephant

The head is made from a wooden ball and the body from a wooden egg. Cutting a slice off of each part makes them fit nicely together.

A hole drilled through the head is as wide as the elephant’s trunk allows a string to pass through. A slim brass rod serves as a hinge for the trunk.

The trunk is carved from a piece of lime wood with a suitably drilled hole for the brass hinge rod.

The string emerges from the top of the trunk and another brass rod, near the bottom of the opening, makes sure that tugging the string results in a downward pull to make the trunk lift up.

A hole drilled straight through the elephant’s body allows the string to come out where the elephant’s tail will be.

Now we have to carve a pair of tusks and make a hat from a wooden cone which sits at a jaunty angle.

Use a template to cut two ears from 3 mm plywood, adding a slim strip of the same material to strengthen the simple glued bond to the head.

Now we have to carve four legs, two longer ones at the front and the shorter ones at the back.

Adjusting the legs to fit against a slightly tilted egg shape was a bit tricky. Trial and error got me there in the end.

Tip

I don’t have a sanding machine as I find the “tools” in the picture do the job for me. The larger tools have a velcro pad to hold suitable sanding papers which you can either use free hand or they can be clamped in a vice. The smaller ones are pieces of fairly rigid foam with pieces of sandpaper glued to the surface. Available in a variety of grades, these are great for smoothing elephant legs.

Making the howdah

Usually howdahs were put on elephants so that wealthy princes could ride around in style or in older, more disreputable, times go tiger hunting from a safe height. My howdah contains the mechanism to allow our pink elephant to fly around.

In the picture you can see three parts. The left hand part is the basic box with a small magnet glued in the bottom centre. The right hand part completes the box and carries a plywood wheel which is turned by a crank outside of the box. The centre part drops into the top of the box so that its wheel rests on the edge of the wheel which is turned by the crank.

Note that the vertical dowel which will turn the “helicopter blades” also has a magnet on its lower end. This is attracted to the other magnet and has the effect of pulling the horizontal wheel down onto the vertical wheel which is turned by the crank. Without this gravity would do a similar job, but only when the elephant is standing on a horizontal surface. Turn the elephant upside down and gravity would pull the wheels apart. The magnets also result in a stronger force than gravity provides, so there is a more reliable connection between the two wheels, while still permitting slip if a child try to turn things directly.

A strip of 3 mm ply above the horizontal wheel keeps the vertical dowel nicely perpendicular to the howdah, which now has some decorative sides added.

Finishing Touches

I carved a small banana and added a few steel tacks to it so that the magnet in the elephant’s trunk can pick it up. Some tape from my wife’s sewing box served as the belt to apparently hold the howdah on the elephant’s back. Some 3 mm dowels and a spot of glue do the actual work of holding it in place. The tail is made of a couple of wooden beads. I painted a mask on its face remembering a joke that my father told me a long time ago about an elephant who robbed a jewellery shop and the red toenails must come from a childhood joke about elephants hiding in cherry trees. I was interested to read that elephants have a differing number of toenails on their front and rear feet. My helicopter blades look rather like a flower, so I added a few leaves to the horizontal wheel in the base to make it more realistic.

Video

Images

https://www.wordwise.de/Elephant_images_archive.zip

The other day I came across a video of Peter Markey’s wonderful “Cyclist” (see http://www.contemporaryautomata.com/videos/cyclist/index.html) and I liked the movement. Not only does the small figure pedal madly like a child on a tricycle, but the road goes up and down, making the bicycle tilt forwards and backwards. “I’ll have a go at that,” I thought and mentally added a small change to the figure’s head to allow it to also swing about, adding quite a bit more movement.

Design

Instead of setting off straight into the workshop, I thought for a change that I would try drawing my design in some detail and in doing so make it easy to print out templates which I could trace around on sheets of plywood ready for cutting.

I used a drawing application called Graphic for Mac. This has layers, so that I could draw each part on a separate layer, rather like layers of plywood. It’s not expensive 3D software, so I couldn’t do a full design at my desk, but I could check out basic things such as checking that the knees do not bump into the handlebars while pedalling.

I chose to use a landscape with 3 green hills. The front and back hills are fixed and provide a framework to hold the axle for the crank as well as a tilting support for the bicycle. The middle hill isn’t really a hill at all but a rotating cam with ups and downs to make the ride more interesting. A rolling landscape.

Cause and action are reversed here. Turning the crank moves the road, which turns the wheels, which make the feet move. The viewer however gets the impression that the figure’s legs are pumping making the wheels turn etc.

Cutting spokes is an unnecessary complication. I thought it would be quite OK to leave the wheels solid and just paint the spokes, following Peter Markey’s example.

To make the head swing free, it is made up of two parts which are joined at the top by a piece of brass rod. Trial and error tells you where to drill the pivot holes and small wooden hemispheres on each side serve both as a flower in the girl’s hair as well as increasing the surface area to which the brass rod is glued thus making a stronger joint.

Making

Having drawn all of the shapes with a computer it was easy to to print out the individual shapes on some card, which I then cut out with scissors to make a set of templates. My bowsaw made short work of cutting out the bike from 3 mm plywood and the wheels and hills from 6 mm plywood. The centre part of the body determines the spacing between the two halves of the bicycle frame, so it has to be a little thicker than the wheels to allow them to rotate freely. The joints are made with 3 mm dowel.

It was only sensible to paint the parts as far as possible before assembling the figure and her bike.

The joints in the legs use 3 mm dowel. To ensure free movement, the hole in the moving part is 3.5 mm and a small wooden hemisphere on the end of the dowel prevents everything from falling to pieces when the pace picks up.

Once I had provisionally assembled the cyclist and had checked that she pedals nicely when rolled along the workbench it was time to consider how to attach the bike to the landscape.

As the shape of the cam on which the wheels run is not a regular circle, the bike has to be able to tilt forwards and back when cycling downhill and uphill to maintain contact with the road. A piece of dowel glued to the base of the bike can rotate in a hole drilled in the rear hill. A certain amount of up and down movement is also needed to keep the wheels on the road. I had thought of making a fairly complex pivot to allow this, but it turned out to be unnecessary. The play between the dowel and the hole in the rear hill was enough to keep everything moving.

Final Touches

The lever that you use to wind an automata into movement is often boring, so on a whim I went for a leaf shape, as everything was so pleasantly green. You can play with the words here as in “Turn over a new leaf and go for a ride on your bike”. It amuses me, even if most of my German friends look completely blank. I usually make the part that you grab hold of red as a signal – “start here”.

Also something is required to keep the front and rear hills parallel to one another and I started with a boring rectangle. Imagining myself cycling through the hills of sunny Italy I thought let’s have a tunnel instead. Italians are master tunnel builders, which is handy given how many hills they’ve got.

Youtube link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kT8DVzUdK0E

Download images here https://www.wordwise.de/Happy_cyclist_mages.zip

Some while ago I enjoyed a video produced by an Italian artist Giuseppe Ragazzini (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VurUCgxdp8E) and I thought it would be fun to make my own real world, wooden version which doesn’t need an internet connection. Then a friend gave me some doll’s eyes, the sort of eyes which close when a doll is put to sleep. That was enough to finally get me started on the Bizarre Belle of the Ball.

Requirements

I chose to have 8 sets of eyes mounted on one disc, 8 noses on a second disc and 8 mouths on a third disc which is enough for 512 distinct faces so that our belle can go to 512 balls and never have to look the same twice.

To frame each face and concentrate the viewer’s attention on it, it seemed best to use our bizarre belle’s arms. Whenever her eyes are correctly aligned, both arms should come up. To make it a more convincing gesture, she should hold a mirror in one hand to admire the finished effect and a comb in the other to tidy her non existent hair. One turn of each control knob should rotate the disc through exactly one eighth of a turn.

Making

The smallest 3 mm plywood disc is attached to a solid 6 mm axle. This axle runs inside a thicker hollow axle for the middle-sized disc. The largest diameter disc turns around both with several spacers joining the disc to its cog while leaving room for the doll’s eyes.

If that sounds complicated, here is a section through the middle. This means you are looking at these discs from the side

To make the 3 discs turn, you then need 3 large cogs behind them.

Small cogs will drive the big ones, so the number of teeth is important to set the speed of rotation of each disc. With 8 noses etc., the number of teeth on the big cogs must be 8 times the number of teeth on the small cogs, so that one turn of the control by the user moves from one nose to the next. I chose 7 teeth for the small cogs which then means 56 teeth for the big cogs. I find that cogs with small numbers of teeth can jam easily and 7 is actually quite close to the limit.

To shape the cogs I used Matthias’ splendid online gear template generator https://woodgears.ca/gear_cutting/template.html. To save time and work here, I first pinned three sheets of 6 mm plywood together, glued the template on top and then cut the three large cogs at once with my scroll saw.

Body and legs

To hold the rotating discs and cogs some sort of frame is required. A dress with a wavy frill at the bottom and a round upper body seemed about right. Two legs would be a bit unstable, so my bizarre belle has four legs. The front part also has to take the mechanism to lift the arms up. Some elegant carved shoes are, of course, needed to equip our belle for the ball.

The hole between the legs takes an axle fitted with an eccentric cam. As the axle is turned the cam presses the vertical actuator down, which pulls the arms up. The loose round part at the top is the lid to keep all of the parts in place and it also has a hole in the middle which serves as the bearing for the axle for the rotating assembly.

The rear part of the body carries 6 small cogs, 2 for each large cog. They are each set at the correct height to drive their own large cog and hence the corresponding disc with noses (left) eyes (centre) and mouths (right). Each knob on the front of the figure turns an axle which turns one of the small cogs. The reason for the second, identical cog is to provide enough space for the hats on the largest dic to move unimpeded. As the two cogs are identical there is no change to the transmission ratio and one turn of the knob will still move its disc through one eighth of a turn.

Putting the parts together after carving eight noses, our bizarre belle starts to take shape. I was surprised to see that, when near horizontal, the doll’s eyes close and open one at a time, as if they are winking at me. Only having four sets of doll’s eyes, I improvised eyes for the other four faces.

Lessons learned

I had originally planned to use three cranks in front of the dress to turn the parts, which would have meant putting the figure on a heavy base. I find that on the up-stroke when turning a crank, models tend to skitter around unless they are heavy enough or have a non-slip coating underneath. By changing to spherical knobs, which you have to twist to operate, the upward force disappears and with it the need for a base. Magic!

The video

It is easiest to understand the mechanisms when you can see them in action so here is our belle of the ball deciding how to look for her next ball. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMLE70_scGE

Download

Download images here https://www.wordwise.de/Belle_images.zip