Attention Deficit Disorder

I designed this automaton to show beginner wood carvers/whittlers how to make a simple articulated character. It was featured in the January/February 2023 edition of Automata Magazine. If you're reading this, you're probably into automata, so I recommend you consider subscribing to the magazine because of it's broad coverage of this diverse and fascinating subject.

The video below shows the character in action – falling over and snapping back to attention. It then explains how to carve the character in some detail.

The guardsman is held together by fishing line and the mechanism is similar to a thumb-push puppet. The simply rounded-off shapes and absence of complex joints makes it the perfect project for beginner carvers/whittlers.

Here's some photos of it and the scaled plans...
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