The Professor's Invention For Peeling Potatoes

I've spent the last month working on a new Lego Ideas MOC "The Professor's Invention For Peeling Potatoes".  See it here on Lego Ideas  I've always enjoyed Heath Robinson's designs and illustrations and I don't often see pulleys, strings and rubber bands in Lego model designs so I wanted to create a Lego set that incorporated some of these more flexible components.  Heath Robinson's illustrations would seem an ideal starting point for incorporating some of these flexible elements.  Here's Heath Robinson's original illustration...

 The model was created in LDCAD (http://www.melkert.net/LDCad) over a period of about a month and the final model was rendered in The Foundry's Modo software (https://www.foundry.com/products/modo) using Eric Soulvie's LDRAW importer plugin (https://www.battlefleet.net/fmtldr/).

LDCAD provides a relatively straightforwards way of using flexible parts and as I've noted in this blog previously Modo's "out the box" rendering is particularly effective when using a variety of different textures and materials in a Lego model.  Although I did discover that Modo won't read custom LDRAW stickers (which isn't a huge surprise) and it's fairly easy to create the sticker in Modo as a texture on a plane.

Creating a functional pedal system at Minifigure(ish) scale was challenging but the ice lollies and small cogs should be able to drive the rest of the mechanism.  The model should be fully functional but like the professor I'm not sure how effective it would be at peeling potatoes (or 1x1 Lego studs!)

You can find out more about Professor Branestawm here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor_Branestawm
The original illustration that inspired this model is here http://www.cgsociety.org/cgsarchive/challenge/entries/18/13467/13467_118388...
And more about the life and work of William Heath Robinson can be found here https://www.heathrobinsonmuseum.org