the animatronics of my pred mask took about 2-3 months to figure out, with 3 different versions, cable, plastic conections, and metal.
I finaly came across a direct servo setup, with the teeth hooked directly to the servos on a ulluminum brace. and has worked ever since.
The top mandable servos are in the upright position and the bottom mandables are upside down.
I found that cables caused to much tention as a hand movement, or hooked to servos on the back of the head, and it also cause the battery life to be sortained by almost half.
I wanted to make a fullly self contained operation for this , the same as my other costume projects. seeing as My costumes are not used in movies, and are used as a face to face contact. or live action, I need to make every thing look as real as posible, and to acheave that , someone else walking beside you with a remote control, dosent do the trick. well for me anyway!
doing these projects for years with no budget, has forced me to search for other means to materials (maby this is why I started with the upholstery foam) including the animatronic setups for curlning lips, alien toungs and predator mouth movements. along with some new projects of extending (growing)horns.
I started experimenting with remote control cars about a year 1/2 ago form some freinds who heard what I was tring to do. and all seemed to go well, so i bought a few better ones from wal mart costing about 40.00 , and used this set up ever since, and it has worked fine, after some minor alterations to the transmitter and reciver and replacments of the cheap servos that come with the RC cars .
Youll need to buy real servos for this if you what the strengh and durability of a long lasting animatronic mask.....
....Ill write some more once I get some pic to show of this process, almost imposible to do with out.
-Pete