I was asked about Frank Marshall’s raising eyebrows and how he was able to make them raise in a horizontal position as compared to the windshield wiper style. I wanted to help so that he could do it in the figure he was building so I am going to describe the mechanism Frank designed to accomplish this effect.
The first thing Frank did was placement of the eyebrow end. It is in the correct position of a human eyebrow. He actually made a vertical slot in which the bend rides for the end wire of the eyebrow. See picture 1.
Then Frank made a bar which has to right angle bends at the ends with a straight throw across the middle. See picture 2
Directly in the middle of the cross bar the control cord is attached and runs down through the head stick and terminated out the front center of same and attached to the lever. See picture 3 and 4.
Pulling on the lever pulls the bar towards the back of the head which on the front of the head causes the brows to rise.
On the left side of the bar is the attachment of a small spring which also attaches to the top of the head. This gives the return of the bar to the correct position. Marshall used 2 tiny pieces of metal rod as stops. See pictures 5 and 6.
I hope this answers all the questions as to how Mr Marshall accomplished his correct eye brow movements.
Dan
www.ventriloquistcentral.com
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Dan Willinger is a ventriloquism enthusiast and ventriloquist figure collector. He has been collecting for over 25 years. He created the Ventriloquist Central Collection. It now has over 100 ventriloquist figures and over 50 of them are Frank Marshall figures. Because of his love for the art of ventriloquism, Mr. Willinger created the website Ventriloquist Central. For more information about the website, go to: http://www.ventriloquistcentral.com
Copyright 2010 by Dan Willinger
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Thanks Dan this helped me a lot!