It was designed by the project’s chief
engineer, PhD student Christopher
Cleaver. Connecting to it were 88 wild and
wonderful ways of pulling a lever, fanned
out in front of it in tight formation (see p9
for a full list). A key limitation was width;
even at 7m away from the keyboard,
the mechanisms were thinner than the
children who eventually operated them.
Long before any were made, at the
start of the project, one of Allwood’s
rst calls was to the Royal Birmingham
Conservatoire of music, and its principal
conductor, Julian Lloyd Webber, who
enthusiastically put him in touch with the
group’s three education outreach of cers.
And he also started writing to his UK
engineering contacts to share the idea –
deliberately choosing younger colleagues,
as the older ones were responsible for
the string quartet.
One of the younger engineers was
Candice Majewski, senior lecturer in
mechanical engineering at the University
of Shef eld. An additive manufacturing
expert, she rst came across Allwood
when she was invited to speak about
the speed constraints of that
process a few years
ago. She was
one
of about 15 experts from many elds
of manufacturing invited by Allwood
to speak on the same topic; after the
event, he worked with all of them on a
combined paper that has since proven
popular: Manufacturing at Double the
Speed (www.is.gd/ajugaz). She recalls: “I
had con dence that he could pull it off,
because getting 16 different academics
together to create a coherent piece of
writing is not an easy task.” Also, she
said that he exuded con dence in the
idea from the very beginning. “A lot of
times in engineering there’s a bit of luck.
Somehow stuff just comes together. And
there is a great deal of power in groups.”
It was the job of Majewski and 10
other teams to go out to schools, and
collect ideas from the children about the
mechanisms that they could use. Exactly
how they did that came from a colleague’s
wife, who was a primary schoolteacher,
and thought to design a lesson plan that
the engineers could follow. First, children
were asked to design an assembly to
strike a mechanical chime bar on the other
side of their desk with a standard kit of
parts, including some Meccano. Then they
worked together to make a piece of music
from their contraption. At the end of the
lesson, they were given an A3 piece of
paper with a piano key drawn on one side,
and a stick person on the other, and
asked to think of a way to play
STEM ENGAGEMENT
Heath Robinson mechanism
needs good home
The entire mechanism, 10m by 20m, is
currently in storage for a year, and the team
is now on the lookout for a venue to take it
for three months. But Allwood hopes that it
will be played again. “Visually, it is absolutely
compelling. It is very dif cult to photograph;
so linear from above, but to walk around it is
amazing.” He says that an ideal venue would
be the Tate Modern turbine hall. Wherever it
goes, safe access would need some thought,
both to protect visitors and to protect the
mechanisms.
www.ied.org.uk 7
/ajugaz)
/www.ied.org.uk