Singing Bird Automaton Restoration

[ambrola]

Before Sunday, I had never seen the insides of a singing bird. I bought this a week ago and was too anxious to hear it sing that I didn't want to wait to send it off for rebuild, so I decided to take it apart to see how it worked. After removing the cage and clockwork, I could see that the previous owner thought it would be a great idea to use blue painters tape and green paint to fix the bellows. The bellows is a three compartment wooden bellows, a bit more complicated than a cuckoo clock bellows. I decided to remove the bellows and the previous repairs to see what I was dealing with. Once removed, I took it down to bare wood and decided how to proceed. I watched a YouTube video on rebuilding a cuckoo clock bellows using DuPont Tyvek, which can be obtained from a Priority Mail envelope. This rebuild was pretty straight forward, but each compartment in the bellows has to be done individually. The pics show the progress and the rebuild was completely successful... The bird is now singing happily once again...

Curt,
Great job Curt.
Ronnie