I tried the first version with his head facing forward, and discovered that if I'm not careful he'll headbutt me in the eye, hahaha. It's a little safer to wrap him around your neck like a scarf and have his head looking backward over your shoulder.

There are salvaged neodymium magnets in each foot (from old computer hard drives) and they're strong enough he can hang on the refrigerator one handed. He can also hold a large spanner in one hand. The idea is that you can put a piece of steel or some other magnetic metal underneath your jacket and fasten him securely in place without poking holes in your clothing. If the puppeteer was wearing some kind of metal armor that would work as well.

I think the magnet idea is perfect for this. Like you say is should anchor him without having to poke holes in your cloths. You might have to somehow make a harness of sorts that fits tightly under the cloths though that has the metal. I am thinking you would not want it to shift much. The weight of the puppet might drag a jacket or shirt off a persons shoulders. In essence it would be "armor" you wore under your garment.

Pretty cool

Ooh, under armor. Good idea!

Ran into a snag with the mechanism, any ideas would be really appreciated.

The neck cable mech assembly by itself is working out really well. Those cables are pull cables, and I'm building a joystick to operate them by.

I was really hoping to also have the mouth open and close, along with a tongue sticking out. So I hinged the jaw, anchored bike cable housing to the skull and ran the cable down to the jaw. This cable is a push cable. I planned to have it run up the center of the joystick and rig it to button. It worked out really well too, if it's pushed halfway, the mouth opens. If it's pushed all the way, it opens and the tongue comes out.

The problem is the push cable interferes with the pull cables for the neck mechanism. It's kind of stiff and the tension of it makes the neck cables pull the head at awkward angles and it loses the fluidity of movement.

I tried attaching the housing to the neck, and then moving it to the body of the puppet. Each time it change the ways the neck moved, and not in good ways.

Is there a way to do a push cable in this situation? Or should I go a different direction? I'm tempted to just glue his mouth shut at this point but after seeing how cool it can look opening and closing hate to do it.

It's alive! Finally managed to hook the wires up to a controller that didn't fall apart. Phew.

That's awesome!  I want one! lol

I must say, that according to the vid, it seems to be working pretty well. However you say the bike cable makes things  rather stiff. Cables tend to do that, and so pull stings are often better for some applications. My first experiments making a long chicken head, I ran a tube up the centre as the main spine. You could look at replacing your very nice vertebrae spine with the bike cable. The stiffness in the cable would give you the spine function, then your neck movement strings can work around moving the cable which would now be your central spine.   That may work. or  ... without seeing it first hand , you may be able to run the bike cable up to the base of the neck , then attach it to a pull string running up to the jaw. keeping the  jaw string as close to the spine as possible, so as to not affect the neck movers as much.

Everys time I log on, I am so impressed by what all the members can do. Seriously, it's amazing.

I think the dragon is looking good. Glad you were able to switch the eyes over to the glass. Epoxy pourables are one of those things, when they set the right way, they are awesome. If you have the mix off by just a few drops, the cloudiness is a huge problem. The clear coat on the eyes totally gives it a life like gloss.

I have no clue how the cable systems work, but it's looking great to me. Do you or Page know if there are intro videos on line to learn how to do things like that? I wouldn't even know what to start searching for...

Nice movements!

Thanks! I ended up running the jaw cable through the center of the neck spring. Ideally it could go through the middle of the neck, so I might try doing one out of conduit or something next time to see how it works. I actually replaced the bike shifter cable with mountain bike brake cable because it was bunching up in a couple of spots. It works a lot better now.