Take a look at this book, and others by the same author. It's a nineteen century mechanical engineer's field day. You should be able to put together any sort of Rube Goldberg you want from ideas here. They are things like converting rotary to linear motion, continuous to intermittent motion, rotational to eccentric, etc.

On my retirement list is to make a giant do-nothing machine by chaining a lot of these contraptions together.

Here is a link that might be useful: Making mechanical marvels from wood