(This is an in-progress gift build... for a one year old. If you're family and you don't want this spoiled for you, don't read! And if you're speaking to my family, please make sure they want to be spoiled on the surprise before sharing)
First published: 2026-10-29 Latest update: 2026-10-29
This is going to be my first "Uncle Liam did a woodworking to create a toy" adventure.
I've looked at a lot of pull-along toys, in many shapes. I'm very fond of the various ways that they use the movement of wheels to make them automata.
I ran into a complication in the original planning of this toy. In fact, I ran into a couple of complications. The first was that I have had my first plan related to this child foiled.
Well done kiddo, that's how do. Get us used to changeing things up early. <- this is sincerity, to be clear.
The plan had been that since their nursery was animal themed, and elephants are the known circus animal, I was going to theme at least my gifts around elephants.
Obviously, eventually this child will be old enough to have their own preferences, which I expected to be when I'd change things up. (Or when I had a really good idea that I wanted to run with instead, that would have been fine too).
So, my original plan for this toy was to figure out how to make a cute automata Elephant pull along toy.
But.. my nibling has a strong association between the word "elephant" and the picture of an elephant (with herd in the background) that hangs in their living room. In fact, you can ask them "Where's the Elephant?" and they will point to the picture, which their parents reward with cheering and applause. (They will applaud themselves about a moment after everyone stops. It's adorable)
They were baffled when told that the stuffed animal I gave them was also an elephant.
I have thus decided not to further the confusion.
The second idea I had for a pull along toy was to make a clown car with peg people clowns that go in it. This is still on the possible to-make list, but it turns out that the pre-formed, but not pre-painted peg people that I can get locally are too small for safe play for a child under 3.
So I went back to the idea of a circus animal. And I realized that there's one common circus animal that is primarly led on a lead! The camel, on which often circuses offer rides!
So, a new idea had been formed, and now I "just" had to design and build it!
I knew I was going to use inkscape for working up a design, as I was going to need something easily replicable as I knew this was going to be a many iterations type project.
So I pulled an image of a circus camel in to inkscape and drew an outline based on it!
Thank you to Leif Jørgensen - who published the original photo of a circus camel under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license here
That got me a basic outline, which I simplified and continued to reference as the design process progressed.
I then spent much time printing, cutting out, and moving around pieces to get a sense of the movement of the automata sections I wanted to make. First this was purely in paper, and then CAD (Cardboard Aided Design) iterations, once I'd purchased some dowel and verified that I had more than enough to use it in mock-ups.
I started the automata design heavily inspired by this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgClj4RdWXY
But if you see how it moves (about 8 seconds into the video), that looks to me to be a reasonable reproduction of how a horse moves... but camels move differently. No shade to this toymaker. It's a children's toy, it does not need to be perfect. ...but that doesn't mean I'm not going to see if I can improve on it.
The biggest difference I can see between how a horse moves and how a camel does is that camels conserve energy by sort of shuffling their legs forward, and on the back legs in particular, that's by moving primarily at their hip. They're not lifting their knees, they're barely lifting their feet.
On a toy where the movement is based on wheels.. this camel is still going to have to lift their feet more than is reasonable, I guess this fellow has a more spritely gait than most. I think I'm going to just say that's fine for the front legs, but for the back? That's just too far away from the weird way camels walk.
A fun side-discovery during the research parts of this, was this Ze Frank "True Facts" video about camels! (link cw: crass language, much icky but fascinating anatomy, death discussed but not shown, gratuitous animal bodily functions. If you've seen a Ze Frank "True Facts", you know what you're getting into here.)
I went thru many iterations trying to find the right locations for pegs on the legs, and which joints to make the connections that move. Lots of failures here, including things that made it look more like a camel with spider legs than anything else.
Changing from past tense to present tense now, as just yesterday I finally had a breakthrough, and I think I have a reasonable method that's close enough!!!
You can see a video of this update on fedi here, I intend on getting it up on my peertube instance as well soon.
This morning I've redrawn my base camel to include a slot for the peg movement (I have some ideas on how to keep this attached in the final construction), and 3 different back leg designs with the peg placed in different locations, with the intent to minimize access to that slot, as I don't want small fingers getting caught in anything.
We'll see how that goes, eventually I'll re-write this part into past tense when I've moved farther in the process!