Looking for book with illustrations of whimsical unicycle factory

Question

I believe this was a book of hand-drawn illustrations, somewhat like Stephen Biesty works or Where's Waldo books. I saw it in the mid 2000s up to early 2010s. The only picture I remember was a whimsical unicycle/bicycle factory with wheels rolling down curvy yellow tracks, in a manner more like a Rube Goldberg machine instead of a realistic factory. I believe the style of drawing was "follow the path" like the kind you see on the sides of cereal boxes. There were unrealistic precariously perched platforms and colorful steam-powered and man-powered machinery that is totally unlike any realistic factory. There were workers everywhere doing various tasks like operating machinery and assembling the unicycles.

This image I found online is reminiscent of the maze-like style of the factory.

For fun, here's DALL-E 3 with the prompt "A whimsical maze-like bicycle factory cartoon":

Answer 1

You may be looking for a W. Heath Robinson illustration. He was a British illustrator & cartoonist who drew intricate and complicated machines to do simple jobs (like testing golf clubs) or solve problems (like having no servants) .

I haven't been able to find a bicycle factory, but he used bicycle wheels (and unicycles) a lot in his contraptions. There are also a lot of precarious perches, made of long poles tied together with a piece of knotted string.

Some of my favourite cartoons are from his series on How to live in a flat, drawn in the post WWI years when more people were moving into the "middle-class" and living in high-rise flats without a lot of space.