My "Jansen" walking mechanism

I like making sculpture that moves or folds or that employ natural forces. I wanted to design a wind-driven sculpture of a horse walking. The wind-driven drive mechanism is simple enough to design but how to make the legs move?
I found this Dutch artist/engineer genius, Theo Jansen and one of the walking mechanisms he designed for one of his "Strand Beasts" (look him up on YouTube, he's amazing). So, I thought I'd try to build one of his mechanisms. I found a picture of one of his linkages and from that I made a drawing, and from that I made measurement and scaled it up. The photo at right shows the result of my prototype build. The prototype in the photo at right is about 11 inches tall. I wanted to see if it would work before I went to all the trouble to cut it all out of metal. I used Popsicle sticks and tongue depressors, a couple longer pieces of thin wood and a circle cut out of thin plywood. I used small steel bolts as linkage pins. It's a little stiff but it does work.
So, what we have here is what would be the linkage mechanism for the right half of a quadruped, front and rear legs. Four linkage arms connect to a peg on the little circle. As the circle turns, it drives the mechanism. This mechanism is designed to have the "feet" on the ground as much as possible for each cycle of the drive wheel. It's gait is not horse-like. It's more like a crab or a spider. But it might work for a stylized sculpture of a walking horse. However, my experiment is a success. I can build one, and it works the way it was designed.
If you had 4, 6, or 8 of these in a chassis, with solar powered electric motors and a little bit of electronics you could build a walking, radio controlled little robot, though steering it might be a problem.

My hand-carved wooden spoons

I saw some home made wooden kitchen implements in an antique store and I thought, "How hard would it be to make one of those?" The answer is: "With a couple of the right tools, it's not easy but it's not extremely difficult". Each one took me about two hours working time over two days. The photo above shows my first three attempts: top to bottom, eucalyptus, birch and cherry. For each one I chose a log from my firewood pile, made a cut length-wise on the outside of the log for the spoon blank. I cut that into the rough shape of a spoon. Then I carved the bowl of the spoon, then the back of the spoon, then the handle. Then there was shaping with a hand rasp and files, and a whole lot of sanding. These spoons haven't been oiled yet. Top to bottom the spoons are 10", 11" and 12" long. I could whip out one of these babies in no time with power tools but I really enjoy making things by hand.
First attempt: eucalyptus was not a good choice. It is hard to carve, splits and cracks easily and not real nice looking wood. And no, eucalyptus wood doesn't smell like cough drops, though the leaves do.
Second attempt: Birch wood is a soft "hardwood". I didn't choose a good piece of this wood from my wood pile; it had insect damage (as you can see on the handle). I went ahead with it anyway. Birch is relatively easy to carve and it is very light. I think this wood is too soft and absorbent to be a good spoon.
Third attempt: I found a nice aged log of cherry wood; a heavy wood,very hard, very nice tight beautiful grain. This wood was a dream to work with. It carves nicely, with good sharp tools, and finishes beautifully. This made a far superior spoon in the end. That's what I'll use on the next one.
So why would I go to all this trouble to make a spoon I can by for a couple of bucks? To see if I could; and I made the other two because I could; and every time I make one, it's better than the last one. Each time I make one I learn something, and at the same time I get better at it. It's a satisfying experience.

Another version of a Tetrahedron Ring

This is a copy of version #5 (I think) of my Tetrahedron Ring series. I think I have about eight different designs for tetrahedron rings. You can see a video of more of these on my YouTube site:
Tesserak Studios YouTube Site

It's made from 1" aluminum angle stock (six pieces) and six steel hinges. Though these six pieces are not tetrahedrons, they are based on two halves of center planes through a tetrahedron, at right angles to each other. I know, that's a little difficult to visualize, but essentially what you see here could be described as the skeleton of half a tetrahedron.
Anyway, what originally interested me about this design is: here is a ring, with each hinge at a right angle to its neighbor yet with this arrangement you can get a toroidal rotation that seems to defy logic.
I don't know of any useful application of this mechanism. However it fits right into my interactive sculpture philosophy; sculpture that you are supposed to play with.

Here's a video of one of these:

My new home made bench

I made this bench out of recycled redwood and cedar lumber. I need a bench for just outside my Restoration Studio office and this project would use up this lumber and free up some much needed space in my shop. The photo above was taken just after completion, before filling and sanding (filling only the worst looking gouges and scars in the old wood). If it didn't already have that ugly "stain" (which is really "stain" colored paint) I'd leave it natural. I'm going to paint it a nice dark "forest green" to match a bunch of other stuff around here that is the same green. It'll look great with two or three coats of paint, and this thing should last for a long time.

The new doll project is proceeding on schedule. Along the way we're learning a lot about design and production of something of this nature. By now, we are way past the fun stage and full into production; by hand, that is; printing, stuffing, sewing, hair dying, etc. Sometimes things don't go as planned and you have to decide if you can use it to your advantage, or go back a step or two and re-do that part. First you love the idea, then you like it again, then you think you're crazy for taking on this project, then you like it again. I just hope we end on a "like it". Anyway, I hope to have some of them finished within a week, and the rest of them a week or so after that. I'll keep you posted.

A new series of soft dolls from Tesserak Studios

We are in the development stage of our next little project; a series of 12 small stuffed dolls. We haven't nailed down a name for the series yet but the one we like so far is "Jaggedy-Rag Dolls" (Ellen's idea). I guess that means I'll have to come up with names and back stories for each one too (groan). We created this series specifically for our new Tesserak Studios shop on Etsy.com. We wanted to make the kind of doll you might find in the Addams Family kid's toy box. Not cute, but not too scary either. Something that doesn't look too homemade. It could be the perfect accessory to your Comic Con costume. Though our dolls will be safe for kids, we didn't have children in mind when we created them.
The Jaggedy-Rag dolls will be based on a doll I designed in 2003 and Ellen made for me in 2006, pictured in the photo shown here. He was part of my clown series of art-dolls. We thought this guy would be something we could make by hand and still keep the price down.
We're thinking this will be a series of 10 or 12, ten-inch dolls. Half of them male, half of them female. Each will be one-of-a-kind. Each will be printed, stuffed and stitched by hand. Some of the faces will be hand painted or drawn. The unique print patterns on each doll are created in-house.
We're well into the design stage at this point. It's been fun working on these designs with Ellen, my sewing genius. We hope to have some finished dolls in about a month. We'll keep you posted . . . in our posts.

Found in my backyard: obsidian stone tool

Yesterday, while my wife Ellen was cleaning her horse corral, she found this stone. It is obsidian, like a piece of black glass, which is clearly evident when held up to the light. I've examined it under magnification and it is undoubtedly a napped stone.  This stone appears to be the middle section of a small spear point, or perhaps a scraping tool. I'm leaning toward a hunting point because both long edges of the stone have been napped. I will definitely be looking to find the missing sections of this stone. This is a pretty exciting find from our backyard. Below is a view of the other side of the stone.

Guitar case project: finished

I had this guitar case laying around in my shop half finished for almost a year. I made it for my main electric guitar, a custom made strat-style guitar, shown in the photo below. The reason it took so long is because late stages of its construction involve a lot of heavy duty spray glue and pretty much puts my shop out of use until the glue dries, and it takes up an entire work bench. I had to wait until I had no other projects, or restoration work, in the shop. So, here it is finally finished. The box has pine sides with plywood "door-skin" front and back. Inside, a hardwood neck brace and storage box, short black fake fur lining. The outside is covered with exterior upholstery fabric, all hardware is brass. Total, actual, construction time was about a week. The trick is to build a case that is as light as possible but still strong.

For the guitar nuts: I could never afford a custom made guitar. They are crazy-expensive. One day, visiting Mark Johnson's (MJ Guitars) shop behind a music store, I was going through his scrap bin and I found this blue metal-flake painted guitar body. I asked him "What's wrong with this?" He said it was a bass guitar body routed for strat style pickups and he tossed it because nobody wanted it. We got to talking and in the end I got the body and all the hardware for it in exchange for me faux-finish painting about a half dozen guitar bodies for him. In addition he'd clear coat this body after I painted it. You can't see it in this photo but up close this finish has several shades of blue and violet sponge-painted over the blue metal flake, with flecks of gold running through it. I looks like a block of lapis lazuli. The excellent neck, made by local luthier Jim Surles (in exchange for painting a couple of guitars) is unfinished maple (except for the front of the headstock) and has an ebony fretboard. Locking Spurtzel tuners, graphite nut, EMG pickups, active humbucker at the bridge and a Kahler trem (which I'm not crazy about). Jim assembled it and did all the set up for me. A custom guitar made by two different custom guitar makers! All I had to do is paint some guitars, which isn't exactly a piece of cake, but I can come up with a really good custom paint job easier than I can come up with the money for a custom made guitar. This thing rocks like a Mo Fo!