Welcome to my new build thread on my spring-driven motor which will drive a chronometer.
I’ll be tackling John Wilding’s Elegant Scroll Frame Skeleton Clock:
Since it isn’t your standard steam or IC engine normally covered on this site, I’ll post this to the Oddball sub-form. Hopefully, anyone who’s interested will be able to find it there.
I read the whole book, several times. And while John Wilding gives lots of good helpful information, I found a lot of information is missing. At least, information that I need! There are several major subassemblies that he talks about in detail (like the fusee stop works, for example), but then never mentions where they go in the clock, or how they work. The Barel Click is another one. He says 'it doesn't move' but gives no more explanation. It took me a long time to figure out that it's probably just for letting the tension off the barrel if you want to unwind it. But it was very confusing for me for a LONG time. I’m sure if you’re an experienced horologist this isn’t an issue. But I was thoroughly stumped on many items. These were just a couple of them. There were a lot of things like that. An additional picture showing how a mechanism hooks into the rest of the clock would have been extremely helpful to me.
And the drawings leave off many dimensions. Maybe they aren't important, but it made me very uncomfortable. Maybe I'm just too used to the thorough explanations that Kozo provides in his books. I just needed more guidance in many places - not more details on how to make the part (though he has some good pointers on this, which is helpful), but info on how it works and how things interconnect. That's where I really needed more help.
So, to remedy this, I spent some significant time modeling it all up in 3D CAD (Fusion 360). It REALLY forced me to figure out how everything fits together and interconnects to make a working clock. However, I had to do a lot of googling and looking in other sources to figure out what some of these things were, what they were supposed to do, and how they fit into the whole. In the end, I think I’ve got most of that under control.
The question now is, will I be able to make it all work? That’s what this thread aims to find out!
Here's a screenshot of the 3D model of the clock. I think it looks pretty good! I’m certain I won’t be up to Clickspring standards, but I’ll be giving it my best shot.
Here’s another picture of the gear train with the frame removed so you can see it all better. John’s design uses a fusee which I’m quite excited about making.
As you can see, I didn’t model the line that will go from the Fusee to the Barrel. That got really messy fast. And since that’s just a purchased item, I decided not to bother with modeling it.
In addition to the clock, I’ll be making a few tools to go along with the project. A mainspring winder:
And a Depthing Tool:
At this point, I’ve completed the design work in CAD and am now creating drawings for all the parts. Here’s an example.
It's a little cumbersome doing this with the free version of Fusion 360 since (1) it will only allow you to have a single sheet in a drawing file and (2) you can only have 10 files available for editing at any time. So I’m frequently enabling and disabling editing on various files. But free is a very good price, so I’m putting up with that for now. And so I can print them on my printer, the drawings have to be A sized sheets, which means I can’t fit very much on a single sheet. I’m going to end up with 40-50 drawings by the time I’m done, I’m sure. I have a long way to go still.
I’m also creating a complete BOM spreadsheet, much like I put together for the A3 Switcher project. After that, I’ll get all the material on order. And eventually, I’ll begin actual work on the project.
I’m quite excited about it!
Kim
