Santa's Musical Workshop Operation

Описание: This is Mr. Christmas "Santa's Musical Workshop" from the 1990's, an electromechanical holiday display piece featuring moving figures and a music box powered by a ribbon of hole-punched paper. It's rather hypnotic, and a tremendous hit with kids of all ages.

These units suffer from degradation of the rubber belts connecting some drive components, and a failure of a rubberized pinch roller that helps actuate the music box assembly. The roller in this unit was "mostly" repaired by removing the metal center rod from the pinch roller, cleaning off the degraded rubber coating, and then wrapping the roller in successive layers of heat shrink until contact was made with the paper again. As this doesn't have quite the same grip as the original piece, the paper will occasionally slip or stutter, but it's infrequent and the device recovers fairly quickly.

I believe that a new pinch roller component could be made using flexible 3D printed resins, but I haven't had a chance to explore that further. For the brief use this piece gets each year, the current fix should suffice.

I'm kinda surprised that in this age of micro-controllers, programmable LEDs, and tiny micromotors, no one has ever tried to create anything like this in the modern day.