Here's the latest progress. Not much to show, but it was a bit fiddly. I managed only three hours this week as I am recovering from some nasty dentistry yesterday. I have a mouth full of stitches, and with the pain killers the 'attention to detail' was lacking a bit. I managed to wreck one of my dozuki blades in a brief bout of frustration, so I had to stop after a few goals were achieved.
You can see here I have managed to fix the plastic geared wheels to wood circles so that I was able to pin the wheels through the arbors. Iv'e added a rough handle (and spacers to stop the gears un-meshing) and have also cut a rounded hole in the top with a Ume (plum) petal-like arrangement of eyelets to eventually accommodate the strings up to the doll. I've also very roughly shaped out the lower section of the doll which eventually will have realistic legs with Tabi socks, with the intent of making proper footwear for the archer. I plan for the doll to look more like a traditional Kyudo archer, not so much like the Samurai archer you saw in my last post - I think it would look more elegant me thinks...
Next, affixing the cam wheels to the main arbor and making tiny rollers and spacers out of Fimo. I might have my first crack at the head of the archer - though I think it will take a few tries to get that just right...
More hopefully next week.
Check out this new karakuri film on Vimeo. Amazingly enough it features an archer. Mine won't be as nice, but hey, humble beginnings...
I haven't had much time to work on my latest project lately due to an erratic work schedule and various meetings- BUT this week I managed to work on the Archer for a couple hours...
This is just a prototype construction, eventually everything will look a little more polished. On the right you can see the brass bearings that will rest on the cams, now represented as the wheels you see here. I plan to cut the wheels into cams as I work out the various movements in the yet to be made Archer doll. The green gears will next be fixed to the brass pinion using wood wheels screwed to the plastic, and then a pin passed through the pinion/new wheel. A handle is next as well. There will be a string 'shuttle' just under the hole drilled in the top to guide the strings up to the doll. I have to be very careful to make this as friction-less as possible, so I plan to use small brass grommets to help with this.
In the next view you can see a few elastics as stand-ins for the springs I have yet to find. Most of the time you'll see the cams a little higher than here as the width of these circles represent the maximum distance the strings will eventually follow.
So for next week (or the next), more of the same; a little more fine tuning, and then a mock-up of the archer.
Planetarium update: I'm still planning to make some kind of device to file the gears of my planetarium carefully. A few technical glitches remain, but I'm close to getting back to that project soon.
Recently I've been distracting myself with various small automata projects, creations I know I can finish. In doing so my confidence has gone up a bit, so I've decided to make my first self-designed Karakuri.
What we have here is the basis of a Japanese Kyudo archer. Yes I know it doesn't look like much just yet, but these wheels and levers will be the basis of the mechanisms that will drive various movements in an upright traditional Kyudo archer. The levers and wheels will eventually have little strings attached to them and with luck I may have the basis of karakuri movement down.
Next for this project is to attach some springs for tension, add a platform on top of the mechanics and begin construction of the mannequin.
A little bit every week and my confidence increases to tackle the tea doll. First, a try at an archer!
