These are my first draft sketches from the new full beard design. Since the mechanical beard would need to get attached to a face I drew a little sketch of a skull and tried to determine where the places are, where one could attach the metal construction with screws to the bone.  For the shape of the beard I took inspiration from the fabulous beards on friends and tutors as well as from a quick google image search of the words ‘full beard’. I thought that the beard should be made of several parts in order to move freely with the wearing person’s head and jaw, so I drew elastic bands, that connect the differnt parts, in between the metal parts that would be screwed to the skull.

Jacob suggested to use expandable watch straps for the moustache parts, so I looked at how expandable watch straps work and what they look like with this video on youtube. This idea was soon replaced by the idea of having metal plates that move with the natural movement of the upper lip. Jon suggested to change the idea, because the watch straps would have needed complicated and time consuming rigging, as well as a lot of time consuming modelling.

The final beard design involved hydraulic cylinders at both sides of the moustache to allow movement between moustache and chin bit. For the hydraulic pistons I looked at existing technologies and tried to recreate them. By chance, I found out about magnetic ball joints and decided to use them on the lower part of the hydraulic system, because it would allow maximum movement and rotation.