I'm going to revive this project as the sculpture has been lying in pieces for a couple of years pending some repairs that I haven't felt incented to get to (pandemic lethargy is my excuse).
When I took it to NAMES before the shutdown, I had to partially disassemble the wings for safe travel. Upon reassembly at the show, I stupidly hooked the motor leads in reverse causing the gears to turn backward, and this caused a jam resulting in two of the gear shafts bending. These shafts are only 1/8" in diameter and have flats milled into them for alignment with grub screws. My intention is to use larger diameter rod.
Another problem, that is evident in the video, is that the main assembly is quite top-heavy. So when raising a lowering it, the force on the bottom cam is quite high. The cam rides on a roller bearing that is supported only by a screw through the bottom frame. This was insufficient to keep the bearing shaft from flexing so that on its downward path to the flower, the beak jerks. This weight also caused the bottom gear shaft to flex and wallow out the brass bearing (needs to be bronze). So I'll need to design a support for the roller bearing that's much stronger.
An incentive to do all of this is that I've recently obtained a 3D printer made by a company called Markforged. This printer is a bit different from the normal plastic printer in that in uses only a filament called Onyx, which is nylon mixed with chopped carbon fiber. The resulting parts are claimed to be equal in strength to aluminum while being much lighter. I have printed a number of parts that replace larger and heavier brass and aluminum in the body of the bird, which is the topmost part of the sculpture. All such parts are black, but I doubt that will matter to the overall look of the sculpture. So the moving assembly will be a good deal lighter.
Here are the parts with the printed replacements:
The original parts being weighed. Over a kg:
And the printed versions: 129g: