Making a Wood Puppet on a Stick

I decided to make a cheap wood puppet on a stick... because I can. My friend lives in Canada so I don't get to see him much and we needed to be able to tell each other jokes much more often so this was the obvious solution.

Notable Materials:

Print-out of your favorite face

1/4" plywood the size of the face

Spray adhesive http://amzn.to/2gVb2oF

Surveying line http://amzn.to/2xoVHaL

Staples http://amzn.to/2wT0Ypr

Pen springs

Notable Tools:

Band saw http://amzn.to/2j4auNu

Bench top belt sander http://amzn.to/2jmRXik

Hot glue gun http://amzn.to/2jfKopP

Drill http://amzn.to/2wy5wSZ

Hammer http://amzn.to/2oDRFEj

This all starts out with a print out of my buddy Pat's face. Do yourself a favor and go check out his awesome YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcM_SykaFqrxVnq5...

Once I find the right sized piece of 1/4" plywood in my scrap pile, I apply spray adhesive to both the plywood and the back of the face printout.

The adhesive is left to sit until it is just barely tacky and the two pieces are then adhered together.

I use the border of his face to trace around on the bandsaw and cut it down to size. The beard is pretty tricky, but I made it work.

Then I sand down smooth the edges that I can reach with the sander.

I can't help but feel like I'm being watched...

Next I have to determine where the cutout for the mouth will be located. I'm going for a jib-jab style thing here, so I use a straight edge to trace that out.

Then it's just a matter of cutting it out on the band saw and this thing all of a sudden has life :)

For the handle part of the puppet I scrounge through my scrap wood pile and find this stick. It's rough sawn so it'll be a nice contrasting piece. I use hot glue to fasten the main piece of the head in place.

To access the mouth and get it to move I need a hole to transition from the front of the stick to the back so I drill that at an angle to help the string slide through later.

I grab my spool of pink surveying line and cut off a length of it to use for this purpose. I use a staple to help hold the string in place and then fill around it with a bit of hot glue to make sure that it is held firmly in place.

Now I need some springs to return the mouth to position. I go to my pile of free pens that everyone has and pull out a couple of dead ones and scavenge the springs out of them.

Each end of each of the springs is bent out so they can be fastened in place. I use a staple again for this purpose and carefully hold it in place with my tender fingers while I hammer it in place (making sure not to poke through the plywood).

I use one spring on each side of the mouth pointing slightly away from each other to make sure that they pull it back into the corner where it meets up with the rest of the face.

And it's officially alive!

Thanks for checking out this superfluous and gratuitous project. Make sure you don't miss out on the build video for the full experience:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thirsty for more? You can also find me in other places on the interwebs!

My Website: Essentially my entire life

https://www.jackmanworks.com

YouTube: Me, in moving picture form

https://www.youtube.com/jackmanworks

Instagram: Preview my projects as they progress #nofilter

https://www.instagram.com/jackman_works

Twitter: Riveting thoughts, in very small doses

https://www.twitter.com/jackmanworks

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note: This post contains affiliate links. Thank you for supporting what I do!