Kinetic Hummingbird Wooden Gear Puzzle

This is a wooden kinetic sculpture that simulates the motion of a hummingbird in flight. Every element of movement is beautiful, from the beating wings to the flaring tail. Intricate systems of Handmade parts bring the sculpture to life.

Intriguing Mechanisms

Making a sculpture like reality takes no small amount of engineering and design. Built into the sculpture are cams, and linkages, all rigorously designed to deliver wonderful motion in limited time. With so much happening at once, deciding where to look can be a challenge.

Unlike any other wood carving movement. Every action has been carefully optimized to make it as lifelike as possible. As it hovered and flew, the smooth movements of its wings, tail, head and body worked together seamlessly to produce beautiful and fascinating visual sequences.

This motions were not simply based on artistic interpretations and best guesses. Slow motion videos of actual hummingbird flights were used as underlays to develop 3D animations whose data was in turn utilized to generate true-to-life cam profiles and linkages.