After some fumbling around I managed to come up with a good upper arm solution that would allow the crank to move the arm in a fluid enough way to make it appear that the arm is doing the actual turning.  The final touch was the green LED’s in the eye sockets.  Green seemed to suggest a sort of malaise that I associate with this piece.  I’m still not entirely decided about the choice of wires that connect the generator to his head but these will do for now.

As is often the case, much of the work that went into this piece will be invisible to the viewer.  A small machine had to be built that would perform several functions at once.  First, to make the arm appear to turn a crank on the “generator” box, which is really just a re-purposed cigar box.  I also wanted this gadget to turn the number counter on the front of the box to record how long our hero has been punishing himself.  And finally I found that the Jacob’s Ladder works best if started and stopped intermittently.  It seems the arc does not always start right away, and once it does the electrodes will get quite hot if they are not allowed to cool occasionally.  The resulting gadget is shown above.  A small DC gear motor turns both the crank and a small cam to turn the transformer on and off.  I found to my initial dismay that in order for the arm to move forward, the counter moved backwards and vice versa.  Then to my glee I discovered a box of small gears in my shop that not only allowed me to reverse the direction of one element, but happened to fit exactly within the space confines on the cigar box.  Meant to be I suppose.

Above are some process images of the hands taking shape.  I used ice cream scoops and segments from bicycle brake levers.  This sort of fussy welding and grinding of small parts represents a large portion of the time involved in pieces like this one.