Furnished content.
(from Lumberjocks.com)
This is a simple, very easy to make Octopus Automata that I made for my daughter this Christmas.The wood for the octopus came from a wine crate and is 3/8” thick.The dowels are 1/4” and the cams were cut from 1/4 poplar using a whole saw.
(I plugged the center hole and then drilled a new 1/4” hole off centered to create the cam.The action is really smooth since the tentacles naturally want to ride along the cams because of their angle.Painted with craft store acrylics and then finished with a clear gloss acrylic spray coat.You can see in one of the pictures that his body is hollow. Originally he was going to have eyes that blink but that will be in version 2.0Here is a short video of him (her?) in action