A walking chaboo, not walking a chaboo.  Although… sometimes I feel like chaboos are like pets- cute and cuddly.

Inventor David Butts proposes a walking chaboo! This is basically the coolest thing I have EVER seen! It  beats out swimming with dolphins , a snake swallowing a mouse, and watching Betas fight. Alright, alright- seeing Brandon Roy hit the fadeaway 3 at the buzzer against the Rockets this year was better but just barely.

The way it works is you pull a lever and through a series of gears the outside part moves, picking you up and dropping you a few inches forwards (demonstrated in diagram above).  Repeat over and over and the chaboo WALKS.  Right and left are independent levers so you can actually steer by pulling one lever more than the other.

David aka Maddog has made many a kinetic sculpture.  He has all the fancy metal machining equipment, mills and lathes and builds his own gears out of baltic birch plywood.  Check out his website Maddog Garage.  Click on the photo above to view a video of a prototype of his balloon tree sculpture.  RAD!

I cant even contain my excitement for seeing his walking chaboo.  Hes not sure if it will work- but I DIG that hes gonna try!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 at 12:44 am and is filed under Project Chaboo, artists. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.