I’m getting ready to plant the Wheels and arbors that I’ve been working on. But first, I had to make the bushings for them all. The bushing pairs, clockwise from the lower left, are for: the center arbor, the pallet arbor, the third wheel arbor, and the escape arbor.
The astute among you may notice that I have four pairs of bushings, but a few posts ago, I had only made 3 arbors. Oops. I was supposed to make TWO of short one – one for the third wheel and one for the escape wheel. The slightly longer one is for the pallet, which has to extend back farther to attach to the pendulum. So I’ll be making one more arbor!
Back to planting the going train. I made a few arbors for my depthing tool, and used that to determine the best distance between the great wheel and the center wheel pinion.
With that measurement set on the depthing tool, I transferred the location for the center wheel to the frames. Interestingly, the location for the center wheel arbor came out spot on! How accidental is that?
Note, I’ve taken the frame apart and reconnected the front and back frames together again so that the hole for the arbor will be the same in the front and back plates. Then I drilled and reamed the hole for the center arbor bushings.
Next, I needed to fit the bushings to the center arbor. I had drilled the holes in the bushings a few thousandths under the desired final size. This allowed me to use these tapered reamers to slowly adjust the size of the hole to be a nice fit to the center arbor. I used the tapered reamer from BOTH sides, so that the pivot point in the bushing is very narrow, thus decreasing friction with the arbor. Once I get these set, both the ends of the arbors and the bushings will be hardened and burnished.
I had originally thought I’d plant the whole gear train here. But I decided I wanted to check the fit of this first new arbor before I went and made more holes in the frame for the next one. If I’m off here, I would like to address that before compounding my error by drilling more holes!
So, that’s what I did. I reassembled the whole thing up to this point to test it. And the fit seemed to be pretty good! Yay!
Next, I took it all apart again and depthed the next gear in the chain. Unfortunately, this one did not hit as dead on as the first one did. Accidents only happen once, I guess. Good reason to use the depthing tool to plant the gears! Guess these clock guys know what they’re doing!
That’s where I stopped for the day.
Kim
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