OK, here are all four spines on the chair. This is a good picture because it shows the chair itself (which is just some 2x4s with a foam board back and no seat), you can see the 2x4 and support pin through the hole in the foam board that will support the plywood wedge described in the "making the head and neck" section. You can also see that, rather than making all four spines identical, I made the top two larger and longer than the bottom two Just a note: I ended up cutting off the back of this chair because the hole you are looking at was unnecessarily big. It ended up being just a slit.
So, there are 16 strings hanging down. What do we do with them? We are going to Flying Crank Ghost them!
The Flying Crank Ghost (FCG) mechanism is very versitile. I use it in a different manner for the crystal ball. It is simply a slowly rotating shaft that pulls your strings in a way that makes your prop look alive.
There are lots of tutorials on the Flying Crank Ghost so I am not going to go into that much detail in the mechanism itself. Here are the basics. I have a Dayton Crank motor that rotates at 6 rpm. You do need a motor with some reasonable torque o make this work. I attached a 4" wooden dowel as the shaft. I surrounded the motor with four block of wood and put 2 eyebolts in the top of each. The tendons ran through these eyebolts and to the free-rotating metal disk attached to the dowel.
This is not the only way to set it up but flexing the "forearm" does pull on the claw tendon so it is better tighten the forearm first then pull on the claw. My setup has the left and right sides moving in unison. The motor is running clockwise.
