Building the praxinoscope machine

We've been working on the praxinoscope machine for a while now, we saw some good examples in the V&A museum of childhood that helped us out a bit. I decided to use part of an upturned childs bike for the turning mechanism with the motor attachment directly mounted onto it, I then mounted a circular pan onto the rim of the wheels and Faysal made the 12 faced middle segment to stick on the mirror.  The mechanism works great and hasn't jammed the whole time its been running which was my main concern.

The mirror itself proved a bastard to cut but i got it done in the end, some of the pieces were a bit rough around the edges which fits the DIY aesthetic we're going for anyway.

I measured up the legs and cut them to size before drilling and bolting them onto the boiler... it seems to stand up okay but we are taking real care when moving it around as copper is not a particlarly rigid metal. Once the two different segments were complete (the tank lifts onto the praxinoscope) we had to work out how the viewer was going to view the animation as it is in the bottom of the boiler and the viewer looks in near the top. We picked up an old childs periscope or... hall of mirrors according the blueprints... at the bootfair and have mounted that inside. We did explore other options but this was the most effective. We delensed some binoculars and fitted them into the tank looking into the periscope that then looks onto the mirrored praxinoscope and YES! We have been working on this machine a long time and it was the most fiddly and tricky thing to get right in the installation, now it is near completion it is really looking fantastic, i'm going to make a lighting circuit we can put inside to control first the light coming on and then the motor turning so that when the praxinoscope machine is not on you cannot see the animation cell prematurely!