Drawing Machine

An automaton inspired by research into the ‘Golden Age’ of automata such as Jaquet-Droz’s ‘The Writer’. 

I designed the mechanism myself, seeking to demonstrate the mysterious inner workings of these automata in a simplified manner. The movement of the pencil is controlled by two cams, one of which controls the up/down movement and the other the left/right. Using this principle, I was able to plot out the profile I would need to cut into the cams to make the pencil draw a picture.

After designing the model in Rhino, I machined each component from brass and steel using the lathe and mill, before finally cutting the profile of the cams by hand using a piercing saw.

I read deeply into the history of automata in order to understand how their mechanisms worked; the secrets of their inner workings were often shrouded in mystery and deliberately hidden by their makers.