Spectrum Scientifics Blog

Spectrum has recently added TimberKits to our product line. These are impressive wooden models that move at the turn of a crank:

This is the drummer kit, perhaps one of the most impressive, but hardly the only model. Spectrum also carries the Dragon, the T-Rex (or TimberSaur) and Ocean Motion.

You do the model assembly yourself, with the help of excellent instructions and some finely made pre-cut wood pieces:

Assembly isn’t easy, but it isn’t overly-hard either (anyone over the age of 10 should be able to do it) but it is rewarding. When you are done, the model will be ready to ‘play’.

Want to see what it does when you are done? Have a look at this video:

The TimberKits are examples of wooden automata. Automata were machines that date back as far as ancient Greece. Machines were used to act as toys, or perform simple functions. They work on simple mechanical principles and functions: gears, levers, cranks, shafts, pulley, etc. Although replaced these days by more modern machinery they had a true high-water point in the 18th and 19th century when they could perform wonders with gearing. A surviving example of this is the Henri Maillardet automaton at the Franklin Institute:

With automata doing wonders like this it is not too surprising that more than a few unscrupulous folks took advantage of the wonders and made fakes, perhaps the most famous of which was the infamous chess-playing Turk.

TimberSmith kits are but a simplistic version of those mechanical wonders, but they are buildable by us, and that makes them wonders on their own.

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Filed under: Oddness, Physics, Robots