I am in love with handmade automata. I especially adore wooden ones, but unfortunately the product of my woodworking skills and attention span has been insufficient so far for me to make one. BUT... I have a much higher attention span for coding up 3D models and printing them. So that's what I did.
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| Spaceman with hiding alien automaton. |
The inspiration for my model is this cute scene by Alan Westby:
He has a lot of neat models, sadly his website seems to be down now.
*cut for 20 minutes of increasingly incredulous internet searching*
You guys, Alan Westby teaches (taught?) at a charter school in my hometown. What a small world. And he was a director at the Fox Cities Children's Museum while I was a child there. Mind blown. Anyway, the upshot is he has a facebook page where he shares some of his other models.
Moving right along. I designed the base and mechanisms for my model from scratch in OpenSCAD, a programmatic 3D modelling package. The mountains were modeled after someone's open source code for making printable table top strategy game terrain but I made so many changes I don't think any of the original code remains. The other models I borrowed from thingiverse:
- The spaceman is the Matter Hackers mascot Phil A Ment (a printer-testing model)
- The alien is a model of the alien from Toy Story.
- There was a rocket behind the spaceman, this one but shortened, but the pin it was glued to broke off.
And here is the final product:
It was really fun to design and print, but did take forever. Next time I dust off my printer I may do some wildly modified version of a marblevator like this one from Greg Zumwalt. There are a lot of cool marblevator designs around.
