With watches or clocks, anything beyond second, minute and hour hand is called a "complication". Examples are day/date indicators or moon phase depiction.
I am beginning a journey to design and build a "grand complication" wooden clock as sort of a signature timepiece. Unlike all of my recent clocks, where complications are done via separate computer-controlled stepper motors, this piece will have a single motor and all timing and complications will be accomplished via gears, levers, cams, pawls, etc. This is how it's done in all traditional mechanical watches.
My current list of complications is:
- day
- perpetual calendar (perpetual means it takes into account number of days in the month including leap years, without manual adjustment)
- moon phase depicting a very accurate moon representation accurate to one day in 200+ years
- celestial chart (accurate to 1/3 second per year)
- GMT (Greenwich Mean Time)
I'm considering:
- sunrise/sunset indicator for longitude/latitude (trick here is how to input location)
- day of the year
- week of the year
- tidal phase (again the trick is to input location)
To complicate the complications, I want the structure to be "open works" or "skeleton". This means that a good portion of the face is open to the gears and mechanisms.
At this point, I think the style will be of a classic pocket watch. I'm thinking 24-30" diameter.
Step 1 - design and prototype the perpetual calendar. This is arguably the most complicated of the complications because it's an irregular computation of days of the month, taking into account leap years. Everything else is gearing (albeit some difficult gear ratios). I've been playing with two designs - a classical "grand lever" design and my own "incremental cam" design, which is unique. Attached are links to a couple of YouTube videos showing the classical grand lever design which I 3D printed. In a nutshell the yellow wheel on the left with all the cutouts takes into account a 4 year leap year cycle. The deepest slots are Febs. Note that one of them has a spacer - that's leap year. The deeper the slot the sooner the yellow pawl can activate a snail on the date wheel (hard to see). If there is interest, I'll post more details of how it works in a separate thread. The unique part of this is the epicycloid "racetrack" in the upper left that drives the lever arm actuator.
This will be over a year in the making, and I hope the description of the journey is of some interest.
I am beginning a journey to design and build a "grand complication" wooden clock as sort of a signature timepiece. Unlike all of my recent clocks, where complications are done via separate computer-controlled stepper motors, this piece will have a single motor and all timing and complications will be accomplished via gears, levers, cams, pawls, etc. This is how it's done in all traditional mechanical watches.
My current list of complications is:
- day
- perpetual calendar (perpetual means it takes into account number of days in the month including leap years, without manual adjustment)
- moon phase depicting a very accurate moon representation accurate to one day in 200+ years
- celestial chart (accurate to 1/3 second per year)
- GMT (Greenwich Mean Time)
I'm considering:
- sunrise/sunset indicator for longitude/latitude (trick here is how to input location)
- day of the year
- week of the year
- tidal phase (again the trick is to input location)
To complicate the complications, I want the structure to be "open works" or "skeleton". This means that a good portion of the face is open to the gears and mechanisms.
At this point, I think the style will be of a classic pocket watch. I'm thinking 24-30" diameter.
Step 1 - design and prototype the perpetual calendar. This is arguably the most complicated of the complications because it's an irregular computation of days of the month, taking into account leap years. Everything else is gearing (albeit some difficult gear ratios). I've been playing with two designs - a classical "grand lever" design and my own "incremental cam" design, which is unique. Attached are links to a couple of YouTube videos showing the classical grand lever design which I 3D printed. In a nutshell the yellow wheel on the left with all the cutouts takes into account a 4 year leap year cycle. The deepest slots are Febs. Note that one of them has a spacer - that's leap year. The deeper the slot the sooner the yellow pawl can activate a snail on the date wheel (hard to see). If there is interest, I'll post more details of how it works in a separate thread. The unique part of this is the epicycloid "racetrack" in the upper left that drives the lever arm actuator.
This will be over a year in the making, and I hope the description of the journey is of some interest.
I have a master plan book full scale on about dozen " ALL Wood Clocks " majority are the Skelton Style, some were here I would like to copy an generate a code for cutting all the parts by CNC. Using different species an color. Counter weights are turned brass along with chain for drive.
