Old head

Found this in the loft - an amusing day's chiselling once upon a time

Freaky wild creatures by Theo Jansen

These are just beautiful.
Wind-powered, and pretty marvelous

Venyosa walk 2 from Strandbeest on Vimeo.

Rhinoceros from Strandbeest on Vimeo.

More or less finished automata head

This shows the head with both halves together
The head actually comes apart like an easter egg

This starts like this...

Then occurs some most enjoyable hacking and shaping with various power and hand tools:


Power planer

Hand saw

But best of all the solid tungsten carbide rotary rasps in a router with its cage taken off, and replaced with a drill handle. This is not good for the lungs or the tips of fingers if one is not careful

Recreating the automata head from MDF templates

Having cut out the layers of the head, the middles were cut out so tha when they were stuck back together, they would have a convenient void inside for putting things in



Next these were glued back together. This was done in two parts. The front (face) section was recreated from the foremost 4 layers, and the rest of the head (back) from the rest of the layers:



This shows the stepped effect of the recreated head. This could be improved by using much thinner layers, for example ceiling tiles.

Cutting out slices of head

Taken apart the carved head feels like some 19th century medical experiment.

The slices were fitted onto some MDF and marked out
The transferred patterns were then cut from MDF

The outline only slices next to the original carved slices

Taking apart the laminated head...

Having carved the head, it's quite interesting to see the layers, as they come apart, especially the fact that almost all the real attention-grabbing detail is in the first 2 layers...

Here you can really see it...

Carving a prototype head in polystyrene

Starting to get there. From poly sheet to cuboid laminated block to carved head...

Laminated construction technique

I have been looking at an amazing
Thomas Heatherwick designed temple:

This made me wonder about lamination as a technique for sculpting an automaton head.

The idea is to carve something as a model in a simple laminated material, then disassemble the model to create a series fo laminate layer templates. These could then be cut from the final material required (like wood or plastic or stone) and reassembled and finished off by carving out the edges of the steps by hand.

hmm...

Concept drawings

Making eyeball socket housings

Fabricating eyeball sockets

A prefabricated ball like this deodorant is handy and comes with a matching housing in which to rotate. Unfortunately as I want eventually to use a hand-made eyeball in another material (wood or possibly stone), this means I will most likely need to create a custom housing to match.

Part of this will also most likely be integral to the head that is eventually used.

The eyeball will sit between two plates. The front plate has a round hole with a diameter just slightly narrower than that of the ball.














The back plate has a square hole to allow a contol rod to move unrestricted in any up/down or left/right combination

Close up of the housing being glued