Making Mechanical Marvels in Wood


Book Description

Guide to making woodworking projects that move, whiz and whir, flip, and more.




Creative Kinetics


Book Description

Rodney Frost provides an introduction to the world of kinetic art - art that moves. Beginning with easy and fun projects like weather vanes and mobiles powered by air currents, he moves onto simple toys that are manipulated with strings and art mechanised by levers, cranks, cams and cogs.




Making Whirligigs, Whimsies, & Folk Toys


Book Description

Create unique whirligigs and other moving-part creations, traditional folk toys, and unusual new designs out of wood.




Making Marvels


Book Description

Featuring more than 150 treasures from several of the world’s most prestigious collections, Making Marvels explores the vital intersection of art, technology, and political power at the courts of early modern Europe. It was there, from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, that a remarkable outpouring of creativity and learning gave rise to exquisite objects that were at once beautiful works of art and technological wonders. By amassing vast, glittering collections of these ingeniously crafted objects, princes flaunted their wealth and competed for mastery over the known world. More than mere status symbols, however, many of these marvels ushered in significant advancements that have had a lasting influence on astronomy, engineering, and even international politics. Incisive texts by leading scholars situate these works within the rich, complex symbolism of life at court, where science and splendor were pursued with equal vigor and together contributed to a culture of magnificence.




Making Wooden Gear Clocks


Book Description

Making a piece of wood move is fun, but making it tell time is truly amazing! Inside this book, you’ll find ingenious plans for creating awesome wooden machines that actually move and keep time. These working wooden wonders might just be the most enjoyable projects you ever build in your shop. Wooden gear clocks are not only fascinating to watch, but can be surprisingly accurate timepieces. Just don’t expect atomic precision—after all, they’re modeled on 17th-century technology! But as you build these scroll saw clocks you’ll use all of the basic principles that still govern mechanical clocks today. Six well-illustrated step-by-step scroll saw projects are arranged by skill level from beginner to advanced, and full-sized scroll saw patterns are attached to the book in a handy pouch. With a little perseverance, you’ll soon be ticking along happily with your own wooden clockworks. All you have to do is build them, wind them up, and let them run—no batteries required.




Big Book of Gizmos and Gadgets


Book Description

Make wildly inspired mechanical marvels from wood, with 15 step-by-step projects and full-sized scroll saw patterns attached to the book in a handy pouch. Scroll saw projects are arranged by skill level from beginner to advanced, from a Rapid-Fire Rubber Band Gun and a Wooden Padlock Treasure Chest, to whirligigs and classic automatons for cowboys, ballerinas, cats, ships, and more.




The Invention of Hugo Cabret


Book Description

An orphan and thief, Hugo lives in the walls of a busy train station. He desperately believes a broken automaton will make his dreams come true. But when his world collides with an eccentric girl and a bitter old man, Hugo's undercover life are put in jeopardy. Turn the pages, follow the illustrations and enter an unforgettable new world!




Making Simple Automata


Book Description

Designing and making successful automata involves combining materials, mechanisms and magic. Making Simple Automata explains how to design and construct small scale, simple mechanical devices made for fun. Materials such as paper and card, wood, wire, tinplate and plastics are covered along with mechanisms - levers and linkages, cranks and cams, wheels, gears, pulleys, springs, ratchets and pawls. This wonderful book is illustrated with examples throughout and explains the six golden rules for making automata alongside detailed step-by-step projects. Magic - an unanalyzable charm, a strong fascination so that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Superbly illustrated with 110 colour photographs with examples and detailed step-by-step projects.




Wood Automata Project


Book Description

Complete construction plans to build your own wood automata. The project is a cross country skier which is put into motion with a hand crank. The manual contains 66 blue prints and 70 illustrations. Detailed instructions are provided every step of the way. Most of the materials required are small wood scraps. Tools required are standard tools found in most wood working shops. The perfect project to get you started in Wood Automata!




Edison's Eve


Book Description

A rich and informative exploration of our age-old obsession with “making life.” Could an eighteenth-century mechanical duck really digest and excrete its food? Was “the Turk,” a celebrated chess-playing and -winning machine fabricated in 1769, a dazzling piece of fakery, or could it actually think? Why was Thomas Edison obsessed with making a mechanical doll—a perfect woman, mass-produced? Can a twenty-first-century robot express human emotions of its own? Taking up themes long familiar from the realms of fairy tales and science fiction, Gaby Wood traces the hidden prehistory of a modern idea—the thinking, hoaxes, and inventions that presaged contemporary robotics and the current experiments with artificial intelligence. Informed by the author’s scientific and historical research, Edison’s Eve is also a brilliant literary, cultural, and philosophical examination of the motives that have driven human beings to pursue the creation of mechanical life, and the effects of that pursuit—both in its successes and in its failures—on our sense of what makes us human.