Post 2: Motormouth

With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me...

— Victor Frankenstein

My £4.95 remote controlled car arrived, and what a bargain it was. It even came packaged with four tiny bollards!

The most encouraging thing about it is just how small it is. I was fully expecting to have to dismantle the thing and work its innards into a device of my own making, but once I've started on my puppet's head the car should be able to slot in easily.

I'm still left with the question of how to convert a toy car into a puppet's jaw. As the car would need to be periodically removed from the head to be recharged, I initially hoped to keep the car and the jaw fairly separate, so that they can be quickly disentangled when needed.

My plan was to rig up a pulley system by running a cord or thread between the two motorised wheels of the car and hooking the jaw to it. First, I tried using thin wire (the grey plastic kind sometimes used in toy packaging) but this prevented the wheels from moving. I gave cotton thread a try, and found that it was too flimsy: it could move things up but had trouble keeping them there.

Eventually, I decided to go for the simplest approach and attach the jaw directly to the wheels. The mock-up in the video above, made using cardboard and blu-tack, looks promising. My next step is to buy the materials for the head and get started on the real thing.

(As you can hear, I had the radio on when I made the above video. I considered removing the soundtrack but decided to leave this slice of broadcasting history intact...)