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Magical Mechanical Davebot

Dave is 29, except he is actually 52. He has worked for Apple and ILM (and not the crazy Transformers junk either, more of the latex and foam rubber era ILM). He's always been obsessed with how things work and has nurtured this sense of playful awe about the physics of the world around him.

He's a great example of the kind of person that we're looking for here at the shop. We want the ones who take apart the clock and fix it rather than pitch it and just buy a new one. Anyone can be taught the complexities of how to work with glass, but few people have an intuitive knack for imagining things before they're built and how to divine a workaround for really difficult problems. And that's critical for the kind of work we do here at the studio, where we often develop an idea that we want to build for an architectural space rather than one based upon what we already know how to do. And that keeps things really interesting. In short, conceive and build the tools you need rather than just limit your ideas by what happens to be in the old tool bag. Back to Dave.

Dave likes dogs, toys, things that fly, juggling, guitar and building things. Lots of things. I must admit that he endeared himself to us when he mentioned with mock pride that he had developed the world's first velocity-sensitive, self-deploying parachute for home-built water rockets.

As long as we've known him, he's been geeking-out on automatons. These are basically manually actuated wooden toys with a whole mess of handmade wooden gears and levers. Dave's got a little shop in his garage and, when he's not on some video game bender (we lost him to the World of Warcraft for a couple of months there), he chooses to pass the time tinkering on a small fleet of automatons. Recently, he got all excited about an online contest that someone in Europe was running and so passed the Christmas vacation preparing for his international entry. Here's what he came up with for the contest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5ZsNViIylI

And this is what preceded it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh-4zSbmhFU

And this one which is perhaps my favorite:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGvDvzk2zRA

Despite being the most cheerful guy in the shop, all of his automatons are dark and allude to the deadening repetition of daily life. Perhaps he has been working here too long.