Book DescriptionWhat's really going on inside an animatronic?
How does a furry character turn its head at exactly the right moment? What makes a dinosaur roar, a robot wave, or a creature seem to notice that you're standing there?
It isn't magic.
It's engineering.
In Animatronics: How Do They Work?, young readers ages 7-12 get to peek beneath the fur, foam, and scales to discover the incredible machines hiding inside animatronic characters.
Along the way, they'll discover:
- Why animatronics need skeletons and joints
- How motors, servos, pneumatics, and hydraulics act like mechanical muscles
- How cams, gears, and linkages turn spinning motors into chomping jaws and waving arms
- How sensors let a character see, hear, and react
- How computers control exactly when and how everything moves
- Why batteries, power, weight, and size create tricky engineering problems
- How fur, foam, eyes, and faces transform a machine into a character
- And the surprising secret that can make a machine actually feel alive
Meanwhile, Tinker has decided to build an animatronic of his own.
Meet SCRAPS.
At first, SCRAPS is nothing more than a box of parts.
Then he gets a skeleton.
Mechanical muscles.
A chomping jaw.
Sensors.
A controller.
Power.
Fur.
And approximately 17 knees.
Wait.
Seventeen knees?
UH-OH.
As SCRAPS slowly comes to life, readers won't just learn the names of animatronic parts. They'll learn to think like engineers: asking questions, solving problems, making tradeoffs, figuring out what went wrong, and trying again.
Packed with fascinating science, ridiculous mechanical disasters, Tinker Facts, and plenty of CLUNKS, Animatronics: How Do They Work? turns engineering into an adventure.
Perfect for curious kids who love robots, theme parks, engineering, machines, STEM, movie creatures, and figuring out how things work.
Because once you know what's hiding inside an animatronic...
there's really only one question left:
Could YOU build one?
Book 2 in the C.J. Tinker Animatronics Series.
