Made my first and second attempts at wooden automata over the past week or so. I tried uploading videos of them but the internet is stupid and I don’t feel like jumping through a million hoops to make it work right now. So pictures will have to suffice for this round.

This is the first one I did, where the central bee is fixed on an upright dowel, attached to a horizontal circle which acts as a friction wheel/cam follower, which an eccentric cam raises up and down, while also turning it round in circles. The two flowers on either end simply rotate on friction wheels. The bee looks like he can’t decide which flower to land on when you turn the crank.

This is the second in the series, a robot whose body and hands (connected by paperclips) go up and down offset from one another by eccentric cams pointed in different directions. I tried initially on this one to do a different configuration for the cam followers, where they were square with wings extending down from them to keep them riding the cams, but with the wood I cut everything from and however I had it, I could not get them to work that way. So I just cut the circular cam followers instead. Since they naturally travel a bit while the crank is being rotated, the end motion effect is also that they rotate a little while bobbing up and down, and the motion is slightly constrained by the paper clips joining them together. Also discovered on this one how not being careful about aligning the holes in pieces does not make for good consistent planar travel of parts as they rotate.

These are extremely fun to make and figure out. I made them using a scroll saw (a Dremel Moto-Saw, the newer portable one, not the older one by that name) that I got and a Dremel 4300 with flex shaft kit – both of which I bought for being able to fabricate small mechanical parts for drawing robots and other little fun projects like these automata. I’m replacing this portable scroll saw from Dremel though with a larger Wen instead, as I think a more substantial scroll saw would be better for more serious scrolling – which is a whole wide interesting craft world and online subculture in its own right.

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