One day I woke up with an old song rattling around my brain with a merry chorus of “mud, mud, glorious mud…”. When I looked it up on Youtube I was reminded that it was actually called The Hippopotamus Song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zpDF3Py7r8). So of course I had to make a hippo. A hippo that might sing too.
The Design Brief
This is a very simple project which is mostly a carving job with the minor addition of a moving mouth.
Making
Before starting to carve I made a maquette in plastercine. The first thing that I noticed was that a large head is heavy and the whole thing tips forwards if the front legs are too far back. It’s always handy to discover things like that before investing a lot of work in carving. I have also decided that grey plastercine is very dull and I will choose something more cheerful next time I go shopping for plastercine.
I carved the hippo in one piece, about 6 cm long, and only then cut the lower jaw out. This makes sure that the jaw will close nicely.
To be able to make space for the mechanism, I then cut the poor hippo in half.
Inside the hippo, I had to make space for a spring and space for the lever to move. The axle on which the lever turns is simply a piece of brass rod. The lever is glued to the lower jaw.
With the lever in place you can see that I also made space for the teeth as the lower jaw comes up. You press the protruding part of the lever up to open the jaw. When you release the lever, the spring pushes the lever down to close the jaw. Once I was certain that everything moved easily, I glued the two halves together and got my paintbrushes out.
Reflections
The mechanism here is very simple and could be used to make all sorts of four-legged animals talk. As the operating lever is hidden underneath the body it’s not immediately obvious that anything moves. This adds to the surprise as you pick the figure up and demonstrate it to your latest visitor.