a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by ThurberMingus
ThurberMingus  ·  1525 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Hubski Craft Fair v2.5 - February 14, 2020

Have you heard about the American wooden-movement clocks from the early 1800s when brass was expensive? My grandad got plans and made one, and I have it now.

He heard about them and got plans from a magazine I think. It might be this guy's design He cut the parts and then shelved it for a few decades. When I was a teenager he got it out and put a little more work into it and showed it to us.

The only 2 brass parts are the escape wheel and anchor. All the rest are walnut, cut on a band saw, filed and sanded to fit the template.

The thing was never able to run more than a few minutes without teeth binding, because while he had a good eye for the artistic side of wood carving, he wasn't precise and there are some short teeth.

I can dig it out and take pictures when I'm home tomorrow. Part of me wants to actually make it work. Find a way to fill in the short teeth or scale the plans down a few percent and re-file the teeth.

Even if (big if) I get it working it would look half-assed compared to insane clock people and their halfassery.

It would also be a strange tribute to the man if I managed to get it working then stuffed it back in a closet because I don't really want to have a tall clock lurking around the house somewhere.





kleinbl00  ·  1525 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Clayton Boyer has made dozens of wooden clock plans. They're pretty cool. I toy with the idea of something like that sometimes but the problem is? I hate woodworking. I hate bandsaws.

You could probably get it working no problem. The great thing about timekeepers is the wheels (gears) are ratio-based. Doesn't matter how the teeth are cut; if one of them has 60 and the other has 30, you will have a 2:1 speed reduction. You could probably stuff the teeth with candle wax, rotate it a bit, and see where the high spots are and file them without taking the thing apart.

This guy is an instagram friend of mine. Florian Schlumpf is not but I still dig his shit. I've been told, however, that this stuff is pure womanbane. Most clocks are.

ThurberMingus  ·  1525 days ago  ·  link  ·  

The design he used didn't have a pretty movement like those plans, it was meant to go in a case.

The problem is a bit worse since he already took care of the high points sloppily. Now sometimes a short tooth will jump ahead half a step and jam it completely. So redrilling the axes slightly closer in and treating 90% of the teeth as tall would be a pain but might be the way to go.

kleinbl00  ·  1525 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Ouch. Yeah, I'm not sure I'd take that on casually.