Steve,
The heads are white cedar, the tails plywood. Maybe I'll try plastic tails on another run, but just using gorilla glue for a couple dozen decoys was a big departure for this dinosaur.
George,
Perhaps my post was misleading with respect to how heads are affixed. All heads are doweled to the bodies, I agree there's no way the black cork would resist twisting and banging.
The machine was owned by a local lumber mill/yard, the old timer who we got it from told us he bought it new. He and his kids dabbled with producing all kinds of stuff from decoys to toys. We got it free because he was going out of business and it was in an old two story chicken farm building, one of the type that's 50' x 150' or so. The lumber yard had used it to store lumber, and had a concrete floor poured on the second floor. To support the second floor load they installed 8x8 posts in random locations. To get the machine out of the building we had to install new posts in order to remove those which blocked removal of the machine. This was quite a thrilling experience as the building creaked and groaned every time a post was removed.