Clock 23 – I have wanted for a while now to do something more with the design of Clock 18, its non-circular gears were a challenge to design in the first place but when constructed for the prototype they worked really quite well. I decided what it needed was a bit more oddness, so the idea of using the melted dial shape inspired by the Salvador Dahli painting ‘The persistence of memory’ was the first step to achieving this .
More odd features followed, firstly the frame with its Shepherds Crook head, and the organic tree like spokes for the gears and finally the the offset Escapement hanging over to one side. The oddness in no way hampers the function of the clock, it is an excellent timekeeper and apart from the care need to align the gears on assembly it is relatively easy to build.
I also used MDF for the first time in this clock, making the frames as a single piece from 12 mm. I am normally somewhat restricted on the size of the parts that I can cut on my small CNC router, so this time I devised a technique for cutting half the profile and spinning the whole frame around to cut the other half. After a false start it worked out well so savedme having to fabricate the frame as I normally would do. That left me with the opportunity to paint the frames instead of finishing with Danish oil so I created the drawing that you can see above with the different colour options, I chose the Burgundy one for the prototype.
I have used miniature ball bearings to support all the shafts to reduce friction and ensure that the drive can run efficiently.
You can view the Detail drawings of the clock and the renders showing in detail the construction of the clock. The free files are restricted and are not suitable for actually making the clock with but all the drawings and renders along with the DXF and DWG files for using with CNC machining can be purchased from the download page.
DXF, DWG 2D files, and the IGS and STP files that can be used with your CNC machine can be downloaded here for $26. You also get the unrestricted version of the PDF files that can be printed at full size.
Drawings for this clock in PDF format can be downloaded here. These free files are restricted so that you can only view them on screen but not print them. Clicking here will download the PDF file directly to your browser, may take a few moments so please be patient.
To view
the assembly instructions for the clock
click here.
Details
of the materials and equipment
needed to build this clock.
To print only a single item of the drawing to scale using Adobe Acrobat Reader, do the following:
Go to Edit, then click on Take a snapshot, move the cursor to the top left of the item you want to print and hold down the left mouse button whilst you drag a box around the item. The inside of the box turns blue and you can now go to File and then click on Print. This brings up the print dialogue, make sure Selected graphic is selected and that the Page scaling is set to None and the click on OK. As long as your printer is connected you will have printed the item at size. Do this for each item you want to cut out.