Automata - Dancing Cat - Learning from my mistakes
1No one ever said that making dancing machines was easy.
One problem is that I am using paper - paper is wonderfully cheap and a terrible material to make mechanicals out of. In future I am going with more heavily reinforced paper and also work larger, because making tiny parts only amplifies the structural weaknesses of paper.
Second problem is that I am new at this whole automata thing, though I have done similar things in the past. I will make mistakes. That is why I am working in cheap/free paper rather than brass or something. Eventually I will move on to wood and brass once I have more experience under my belt.
Any future projects will have to wait on my renovation of my workshop, which needs the nasty old carpet to be torn out and new vinyl flooring put in, and other upgrades to the tool storage and general storage aspects. After that, at some point I would like to make a Viking rowboat animation with scared Vikings on a turbulent sea. I may actually make that from wood, I have some 1/8th inch basswood board coming in. I have some 1/4 inch wood in already but I intended that mainly for clockmaking experiments rather than automata.