Wood Automata Tips and Tricks

By Ken Schweim

This book contains detailed descriptions, drawings, and photos of the most popular wood mechanical movements found in current wood automata projects. A detailed set of plans is included in making your own wood gears. Photos are included wherever possible to show the various wood mechanical movements in use. The last section of the book is a complete set of detailed plans to build your own wood automata, which is a figure doing push-ups. Automata is a form of art. Some use it to build interesting automated wood mechanical art projects and others use it to make toys. Links are provided to offer ideas and to see what others have done. Although the book has many dimensioned drawings and photos, it is easily viewed with readers as small as Ipods and Iphones making it ideal to be viewed with minimal restrictions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ken Schweim
• Release date: Feb 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458130969

Ken Schweim

Retired teacher/Paramedic

Book preview

Wood Automata

Tips and Tricks

By Ken Schweim

Smashwords edition

Copyright 2011 by Ken Schweim

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Project Design

Operating Frame

Human figures

Cranks and Shafts

Cams

Oscillating Motion

Gears

Levers

Belts and Pulleys

Ratchets

Linkages

Make your own automaton

In the world of automata, a single project is called an automaton. An automaton can be defined as a self operating machine or mechanism. In this book an automaton could be defined as a wood project that involves movement of parts. It could be a humorous movement to watch like two people sitting at a table, banging their hands on the table, and obviously verbally attacking each other. It could be an art project with parts that move in a way that is pleasant to watch. It could be a project with parts that move, that simply beg an answer to how did he do that? Of course it could be some combination of all of the above.

It is assumed that all the automatons in this book will be made from wood and receive its primary motion from a hand crank. Alternatives could be an electric motor, wind-driven, water-driven, solar driven, or possibly gravity driven.

There is a lot of help on the internet for building wood automata. However, most people have their own project design ideas and that’s what makes it an interesting hobby. Since there is no set pattern or set of guide rules for automata design, I’d like to share my experiences also and offer what I have learned while building my wood automata.

This book will be divided into two major sections. The first section is labeled Construction Techniques and will discuss the components of automata and how to apply them to your project. The second section is labeled Making your own automaton and will provide detailed instructions to build an automaton, which is a human figure doing push-ups.

To help demonstrate many of the automata concepts I have included reference to two YouTube videos of my own automata. The first video is a somewhat simple project involving one individual doing CPR. The second video is a large automaton which I called Convolution. It involves many mechanisms and automata concepts.

The CPR project can be seen here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01U3XIEdVXI

Convolution can be seen here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgbUV7xv_sk

I will be making frequent reference to these projects to illustrate various automata concepts.

Building automata requires a basic knowledge of mechanisms. If you are new to this mechanical movement thing, I would highly recommend the following hardcopy books:

Making Mechanical Marvels in Wood by Raymond Levy – I would consider this book an absolute requirement. It provides detailed instructions on how to build many wood mechanisms. The only thing it is missing is human action figures

Cabaret Mechanical Movement – Do an internet search for this title and you will also find Cabaret Mechanical Theater. That site will provide an unbelievable amount of information on automata.

507 Mechanical Movements by Henry T. Brown. – Almost every mechanical movement ever thought of is pictured and described.

If you are serious about learning automata, would like to keep up on what others have done, would like to be notified of new ideas, tools, or automata books, consider the following web site as a "must see.

http://www.dugnorth.com/

As with just about everything created on this earth, there always seems to be another way it could have been done. The internet provides an almost endless source showing examples. Fortunately the site below lists most of them.

http://www.kugelbahn.ch/3_link_automata.htm

The list above will provide more reference material than you can imagine. There are lots of pictures and videos of automata that others have made that may inspire you to develop your own. Deciding on what automaton to make may be the most difficult part of the project. It’s very similar to an artist deciding what to paint. Many of the YouTube videos show the mechanisms in detail. Even though you may have used a mechanism before, you will undoubtedly find a new use or variation of that mechanism. Looking through the internet sites should provide you with all the ideas you need.

I do not claim to be an expert on wood automata. However, my wood scrap box needs to be

Reviews for Wood Automata Tips and Tricks

[angel8guillen · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Impresionante, lleno de esperiencia. Parece facil algo que seguramente no lo es. Pero creo que voy a intentar hacer mi automata. Brillante