#70 The Monkey Machine
Greenside Primary School in Pudsey, West Yorkshire, delighted our engineers with this invention - 'The Monkey Machine'! Thankfully the imaginitive designer allowed us to build a mechanical monkey in the absence of a real monkey...
It's design is simple - the monkey is held on two pieces of string and relies on friction to move forwards. Once it reaches a point near the end, it will hit a banana, which will be attached to the pivot that hits the key. When talking to greeside primary school, they helped design some supports of decreasing height to hold the string in the correct place as well as a simple return mechanism for the monkey. These supports will be decorated as trees.
The design does have a few seconds delay on it, depending on how fast the person operating the monkey pulls the rope! We decided to reduce the time it takes for the monkey to travel to have it travel a shorter distance, from the final support to the banana, rather than travelling the full way. A rope has also been added to the back of the monkey as a returning mechanism to allow it to play repeated keys.
