I was responsible for constructing the eyebrows and eyelids, so I'm going to outline here the construction of those two elements and their integration into the rest of the head. I also took responsibility for the artistic side of the project, which I will also outline here.
Eyebrows:
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| The inside of her head |
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| Her face |
I originally planned on making the eyebrows out of delrin and painting them. However, my first set did not work (the hole was too big) and I ran out of time to iterate. So, instead I ran with an idea that Chris gave me. He suggested that I make them out of craft material and attach them using a lego connector piece. I made the eyebrows out of paper mache and them painted them with brown paint. I then attached, using a glue gun, a lego piece which connected a lego rod to the paper mache. As you can see, they broke sometime during our demonstration. After duct taping them back together, they worked. For the presentation at the craft fair, I cut new eyebrows out of a plastic plate, painted them, and used those instead of the paper mache ones.
To make the eyebrows move, I used a gear chain. This way, one motor could spin and rotate one gear, which would move both eyebrows. I had issues with this, as the gears would come apart and stop moving each other, which I solved by connecting the two long lego pieces which held the gears with legos holding them in place. This working was all dependent on the spacing of the two holes which the lego rods went through which were precisely 6 lego units apart.
Eyelids:
This was insanely difficult design problem. The design of the eyelids was constrained by the eyes and the face structure. Our first problem was cutting the ping-pong balls in half. We tried to hacksaw them in half, but that was not so effective because it was hard to cut the slippery, spherical ball precisely using a saw. What we ended up doing was starting the cut using the saw, and finishing using sharp scissors.
All of my ideas for opening/closing the eyelids involved a rod going through the diameter of the eyelid which they would rotate around. However, this posed many, many problems. First, this rod could not actually pass through the parts where the eyes are. Second, we could not drill a hole in the face.
After brainstorming and rejecting many bad ideas (the worst of which involved flipping the eyelids up instead of rotating them which would make the lids visible and in an awkward position covering the eyebrows when the eyes were closed), I constructed a compromised mechanism.
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| Eye mechanism from the side |
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| Eye mechanism close up |
I took a long piece of piano wire. Now, instead of having it go straight through the diameter of the eyelid, I curved it so it followed the curve of the ping-pong ball and then taped it in place using copious amounts of duct tape. I only did this one eyelid. I tried to do it with both, but the process of precisely curving the piano wire took a really long time and it would not be an efficient use of time. Instead, I taped it just inside the other eyelid using large quantities of duct tape and on the other side I taped inside a thumb tack, the top of which I cut off using scissors. Then I taped this mechanism on the back of the face using duct and masking tape.
My next task was to design the mechanism which would make the eyelids open and close. My first idea was to use string and wind it up and back. I never implemented this as I knew that there must have been a better way. My next idea was to use lego rods, but I needed something with variable length, so this idea was scrapped. The idea that I implemented was a combination of the two. The motor turned a rod which had smaller rods connected at a 90 degree angle. These small rods never touched the eyelid. Instead, duct tape connected the lego rod and eyelids. When the small rod rotates up, the top of the eyelid is pulled up, closing the eyelid. When the small rod rotates down, the top of the eyelid is pulled up, opening the eyelid.
Art-y things:
Wendy without paint or the back of her head or hair did not look like a person. First, Christine and I paper-mached a head. I made the structure which we paper-mached on using cardboard and a plastic bowl.
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| Our paper mache head - before we painted or cut it |
Next, I painted the face. This took some time. I also had to paint things multiple times, because the paint chipped easily. Furthermore, I'm not a very good painter, so I had to wipe things off and redo them often. Fortunately, this was easy when painting on delrin, because dry paint scrapes right off easily. After the head dried, like a day after we made it, I cut it out to fit over the head and painted it peach. Christine made the wig which we draped over the paper mache. We then decided that it looked like me, so we also added one of my hats (for those who don't know me, hats are kinda my thing).
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| Wendy before paint and a jaw |
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Wendy and I - I always did want a sister |
