An Interesting Specimen - In progress

  - a contemporary automaton by Dug North

Here is the automaton near mechanical completion.

I hand-carved the full-scale hand in-the-round using my own hand as the model. Carving your own hand can be tricky. In hindsight, I would have carved my left hand rather than my right. Being right-handed, I had to put my carving tool down -- whatever it was at the time: carving knife, dremel, file, or riffler -- in order to pose my hand. This means I put down and picked up my tools hundreds of extra times.

Better still would have been to get a model hand.