Inspiration
I have often admired Peter Markey’s Guitar and dancer (https://cabaret.co.uk/artists/peter-markey/) and thought “I’ll have a go at that” but with my own particular twist. At some point, the dancer became a bear but that was OK, even if I did start humming that Louis Prima hit where Baloo the bear dances around as the monkey king Louis sings “I Wan’na Be like You” in The Jungle Book (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud5J7Ye332I).
Approach – Just go for it
Aiming for a simple project, I abandoned the guitar player and concentrated on the dancing bear. I decided to just go for it and start making, without having a clear idea at the start of how it would work.
After sharpening a pencil, I drew myself a bear on a piece of paper and then reduced it to seven pieces which I copied onto a piece of cardboard and cut everything out.
Down in the workshop, I used the cardboard templates to make prototype parts out of MDF.
Some 2 mm thick brass pins served well as hinges.
I lengthened one leg to form a lever to get things moving.
To keep things small, I added a bend to the lengthened leg. I found a couple of cogs from an old abandoned project and fixed everything to a piece of scrap wood to check the movement.
Once I was satisfied with the movement, I used the MDF parts as templates and cut out more robust copies in 9 mm thick plywood. MDF is cheap and quick to cut, but I don’t think that it’s sensible to make moving parts from it. Cool bears wear sunglasses of course.
Taking the measurements from the prototype assembly, I made a box and added a crank to get things moving.
The top holds two brass pins centred in the bear’s feet. The slot is for the lengthened leg which connects to the dowel mounted on the large cogwheel as you can see in the quick prototype assembly.
There is a total of five brass pins for five joints. The legs and the body are move by the cogwheel via the lengthened leg. The arms are firmly attached to the low-hanging head on the front side but the pin passes freely through the body. Gravity thus moves the head and arms to maintain a roughly horizontal position. Friction makes this a bit unpredictable, making the dancing bear’s “moves” more interesting.
From the side, the bear’s shape is not recognisable. As the crank is at the front, this compels a user to look at the front view, which does look like a bear.
From the front, it looks satisfyingly bearlike, even if my first young quality control checker reckoned “that’s a funny bear!”. I can’t argue with that.
Reflections
You do have to turn the crank quite quickly to get the bear suitably dancing. Everyone has their own style of dancing of course, so who am I to make the rules? I just used cogs that I found lying around. Should I ever remake this I’d probably use a smaller main cog and speed things up a bit; just a bit, it is a cool bear after all.
Video
URL to video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRLQh6L3nec
Downloadable images
Download ZIP package from https://www.wordwise.de/Cool_bear_archive.zip.