Years and years ago while living in Canada I designed a clock – a proper, old-fashioned, mechanically-driven clock. It was only once I’d moved back to Auckland more than a decade later, and into a house with a shed, that I had a chance to actually start on it. But by this time I’d added a twist. Instead of just making a cool clock, I wanted to see whether I could make it from recycled ingredients; specifically, old bicycle parts …
The Grand Plan
As you can imagine the gearing became the first big challenge. Getting a simple clock with a ratio of 1:12 is easy enough, but that wasn’t what I was after. My original design had just casually included ratios for tides (Auckland has two harbours, so both of them), moon phase, and moon position that were […]
Gear design
I won’t pretend to any kind of subtlety or elegance in how I went about designing the gear train for the clock; it was sledgehammers all the way, baby, (in Excel, no less …) and definitely no KISS-ing! As a first go, I simply made a set of worksheets which calculated all of the possible […]
Oct Clock Defrock!
I’ve been lacking aesthetic inspiration for how to finish the clock, so decided to do the unthinkable and leave it clean. There are a few details left to do – I need to add markers for the tide at different locations – but I’m not going to add clock numbers or anything like that: I […]
Signs of Life 