DANCING SKELETON PUPPET

I saw this video a while back but had forgotten how good it was. Even knowing it's not real, it seems absolutely real to me. He's got personality and stylish moves. I like the second half of the video best. He looks into the money hat and then weeps at the pitiful amount. I also like how he stops everything he's doing to take the time to watch the pretty girls walking by. Too bad the Ed Sullivan Show isn't still on. I bet this skeleton would have been a huge hit back then. It's somewhat depressing to know a puppeteer this talented isn't already rich and famous, and is reduced to working street corners.

MOST USELESS MACHINE EVER

There are a ton of these on Youtube, so I'm not sure if I've found the most useless one or not. I guess if you look around online you could probably find instructions to make them. I'd kind of like to have one for myself.

CAP'N CRUNCH PADDLE BOAT PREMIUM

This is a send-away premium from Cap'n Crunch cereal. It's the most elaborate cereal prize I've ever seen.

Some guy on Ebay is selling a bunch of them. He must have looted some abandoned warehouse. You get them in the original box they were mailed in back in the day.

I got this for $6 plus shipping which is a really good price. I saw some people selling this same thing for $35 and even $60. If you want one you should hurry up. He had a limited supply.

The instructions seem kind of complicated for a kid.

Yikes! Look at all the little finicky pieces! This is probably one of those projects the dad had to do while the kid sat and watched.


It came with 3 rubber bands and they are still in a worthy rubbery state.


Stickers for extra realness!

These paddle boats come in the original boxes and I don't think the parts inside have seen the light of day for decades.
I guess I'll eventually put it together. In the meantime if you want to see what it looks like assembled...

A guy named Jeff Pidgeon got one and put his together. Here's a picture I totally ripped off his blog. I hope he doesn't mind. He has bunches of cool toys and drawings. You ought to check him out by clicking HERE.

JONATHAN JIGGS HOMEMADE SONG VIDEO

I was just kidding about that last post. April Fools.

Here's a video I made with my brother back in the good ol' days. Maybe the late 80s or early 90s.

All the pieces are cut out of paper and controlled by hand off-screen. It seemed like an easy and fun project before I started but turned into an enormous amount of work. I surprised at the huge stack of paper parts I had when I'd finished.

My brother Kevin would aim the camera on the fly and do his best to keep my hands out of the frame. Sometimes though I'd reach in too far. I guess in the end it doesn't really matter if the hands are visible. It's not like I'd be fooling anyone anyway.

We didn't have computer video editing equipment back then so I filmed all the shots separately and edited them together by bouncing back and forth on 2 VCRs. You end up having to do some guesswork and wishing and hoping it will time out right in the end.



We didn't have a real video camera back then. Kevin had a kid's camcorder which filmed onto standard audio cassette tapes. It was the Fisher-Price PXL-2000. I think that meant it had a total of 2000 pixels. The video is a little blurry so I'll explain the plot.

There are 2 starving guys stranded on a life raft. They kill and eat a bird to survive. They don't realize the bird ate some fish which were swimming in toxic waste, so the bird meat kills them. The end.

The video doesn't really have anything to do with the song. The song is about a guy named Jonathan Jiggs whose plane crash lands on an island. While there he meets and island girl who he then falls in love with. Later he learns she is a cannibal when she eats his ear. He has to put her down and buries her by a pineapple tree.

Her corpse fertilizes the pineapple tree and makes the pineapples grow healthy. Now when he drinks his pineapple juice he likens it to kissing her. See? A love story!

WOODEN CRANK TOY - IMPATIENCE

Here's a wooden crank toy I made. It's not completely my idea to make a tapping hand but I've not seen one made of wood that works like this one.

Watch it in action! It had a tendency to active dog barking, but since this video was made I've put rubber pads on the finger tips. Now it's a more human-like thump instead of a wooden clack.

FACE BANK

I bought two banks from a Japanese website called Strapya. They were around $20 each. I got this and another bank, and the total shipping for both was only $5. That boggles my mind how I can get something shipped from Japan for $5. I recently bought an $8 How-to-Draw book from here in the USA and the shipping was an additional $8.

There are motion sensors in the eyes and that triggers the chomping.


Look at this thing go!

DOG BANK

I just bought this is nifty bank from a Japanese website called Strapya. It was about $20. I got this and another bank, and the total shipping was only $5. That's not bad coming all the way from Japan!

Here he is in action.

LOST TREASURES OF THE GOODWILL

Most of the time it's a wash when I go to the Goodwill, but it's on the way home from work so I go ahead and stop in. Sometimes I get lucky and find stuff like this for 25 cents. It was broken but when I unscrewed it I saw there was just a disconnected gizmo. I put it back where it was supposed to be, and loaded batteries and it worked again.

He walks, turns his head back and forth, his arms move and he lights up all over. There's a little rolling picture of a space scene in his chest, and he speaks and makes laserblast noises. He says "I am a Super-Fighter. Drop it! Don't move!"
Pretty good for a quarter.

Watch the video:

INCHWORM CRANK TOY

As the crank is turned, a lovesick boy inchworm chases a frightened pretty girl inchworm around in circles. It took me several months to figure out how to make it work. I have pages of notes and ideas involving all sorts of methods. Each time I'd think I had it all figured out, I'd realize some aspect of it would only work in a world of cartoon physics, or if we had a such thing as the 4th dimension so 2 things could occupy the same space.

I looked through lots of books about gears and mechanical movements, and I learned about the Geneva Wheel. That's the secret to everything! I guess it was invented by Swiss clock makers to have intermittent movements instead of a constant and steady motion mocking the movement of the crank.

A Geneva Wheel consists of 2 wheels actually. One has notches in it, and the other has a pin to fit into the notches. As the PIN wheel turns it slides into a notch in the notched wheel. It turns just enough to align the next notch up into the path of the pin, so as it comes back around it repeats all over. You can put as many notches in as you wish... as long as you get them in the right place.

Here's a picture of the various pieces before I put it all together. Depending on the task of the piece, some needed to be plywood for strength. Normally I don't like the look of plywood but when there's danger of fragile parts crumbling there's nothing better wood-wise.

Here's a side view of the inner workings of it all. After I got this thing built, almost immediately after I glued in the last piece, I thought of a way to make the box half as tall. The more streamlined I can get it, the better. I guess my next one will be better. I've also thought of a way to not have that big circular opening in the top of the box.

ACTION!

HEAD-CHOPPER CRANK TOY IDEA

I have an idea for a wooden crank toy. It will consist of a knife-weilding head-hunter standing over a victim who is lying on the ground. It would all be carved from wood and be roughly 7" tall.

With the turn of a crank, the head-hunter will draw his knife-arm back and then give it a good whack into the neck of his victim. After that the head-hunter's other hand will raise the victim's head up off his neck and lower it back down. This action will repeat as many times as the crank is turned. Great toy for kids!

This is the process I go through before I build anything. I don't start cutting pieces of wood until I'm fairly certain it will work and be worth the time. If you look at the drawings in order you can see the evolution of the idea. I think it's actually doable in the last drawing.

I'm happiest with this version because it's the simplest. The more moving gizmos you get away from, the better off you'll be. Each new gear and cog and axle is one more thing to give you fits. I needed one horizontal rotating motion for the knife arm, and one vertical motion for the lifting arm. This version of the idea does both motions with only 3 doohickies: A crank-powered axle, a triangle cam, and an off-center cam.

FOR THE KNIFE ARM:
2 pins on the main axle will knock a triangular cam back and forth.

FOR THE LIFTING ARM:
An off-center cam will raise and lower a little wheel attached to the head-hunter's elbow.

I am angry at how simple the answer turned out to be. It may not look like that big of a deal, but it took me days and hours to figure it out. Next time I need those movements though, I'll be ready.

If you are interested in this kind of stuff, you ought to get a book called 507 MECHANICAL MOVEMENTS by Henry T. Brown.

Here's an online copy of the book, so if you're a cheapskate you don't even have to buy it!

http://www.scribd.com/doc/441240/Five-hundred-and-seven-mechanical-movements

Any motion you need, this book will show you how to make it happen.

FLAPPING BAT CRANK TOY

This bat was carved from mahogany. After I made his head/body section I had no idea what to do with him, and he sat for a few months. I came up with some fairly involved ideas but eventually settled on this.
His wings were so thin I couldn't think of a good way to attach the hinges. There wasn't enough wood to firmly hold screws, and the wings were curved so the hinges wouldn't lay flat on the surfaces. The only thing I could come up with was to take an Exacto knife and slice out a sliver at a time into the edge of the wing and slide the hinge inside. The wing was paper thin and a little flexy on either side of the slot, but once the hinge was in place there was no problem. Then I put dowels in the wings to pass through the hinge screw holes.
This is how the contraption works. As the wheel turns it raises and lowers the bat's support dowel. Copper wire holds the wings near the hinges. The spot the wings are held becomes an axis as the body moves up and down. 

I had to do a lot of measuring to get the wires the right length. The 1st attempts went badly because the wires were either too long or too short causing everything to lock up. It's surprising how much difference even an 1/8 of an inch will make.
Here's a video of what he looks like in action.