With all the mechanical stuff basically worked out, only the considerable task of personality remained.  It had long been my intention to mount a pair of old “magic eye” vacuum tubes in his head.  The problem there was I was having difficulty figuring out how to wire them.  Then I stumbled upon this webpage.  Subsequent emails with its author were the final key to finishing the piece.  He actually wound up supplying me with a finished circuit through the mail.  Thank you Howie!  I had to take it apart some to work it into rest of the system I had already built.  The real trick was to get the striking motion of the wooden hammer to turn the potentiometer knob that operated the eyes.  For clarification on this point, see the final piece with video here.

I actually found the head over a year ago.  It was some sort of optical test equipment that was too cool to chop up until I had a decent  idea.  That came when I realized that a pair of compact vacuum cleaners could be joined to make a body that had a good proportion to the head.  The vent from an old circular saw motor forms the mouth.

The entire figure was built well before I had any sort of sense of what he would be doing.  I only knew that I wanted him to operate some kind of relatively complex machine.  With this in mind he was made with as many articulated joints as I could manage.  This stage of the project actually moved much more quickly than I had imagined.  The trouble was, this left me with a life sized (and fairly heavy) robot that could not support any of its own weight without collapsing like a drunk.

Since it was my intention to make this fellow into some sort of a laborer I knew his hands would need to be emphasized.  The fingers were clamps of some kind and the palms are the light covers from yet another pair of vacuum cleaners.  The elbows became a real point of pride.  I’m not sure what the “Y” linkages were, but with some old ball valves, bearings, and a good deal of machining they made great universal joints.

An early notion was to have the figure seated at a sort of console that he would pedal like an old sewing machine.  Then I came across a nice old wagon wheel at the Alameda Flea market and the piece took a more bicycle direction.  None the less I was very concerned that it be more than simply a machine for transportation.

Around the time of this discovery I decided that the wood wheel was the excuse I needed to dive into my collection of old rocking chairs.  Stripping the wheel to bare wood was more work than I care to admit, but it prepared it to match well with the other wood objects in my collection.

A coffee table top was quickly selected as a base to mount the machine on.  This was necessary because it is in the nature of the wood objects to flex and bend under pressure.  If I wanted the thing to retain its shape while in motion I would have to find ways to secure it wherever possible.

A period of frantic experimentation follows.  The goal being to find the right combination of belts, wheels, and chair parts to get the figure to use all of the articulated joints that I went to so much trouble building for him.

For a while I thought that the ends of a gaudy old window curtain would make a nice skirt to cover the wheels and motor under the base.  This idea did not test well with friends and neighbors who frequent my shop, so my old truck locker finally went under the torch to yield the diamond plate cover that I eventually settled on.