Involute gear clock

[homebrewed]

If you make some of the gears from aluminum, you could get them anodized (or do it yourself) with different colors. Anodizing also might take care of aluminum-on-aluminum galling. That would add some bling to your project.

 

[dewbane]

The point about brass sheet is well taken. I always make things out of round bar, or, rarely, square, so I have a round bar mindset. For big gears, it does make a lot more sense to cut a blank out of a sheet instead. That's probably how Clickspring did it.

As far as a progress report, I put in 70 hours at work last week, and haven't made any progress yet. The only thing I'm really rolling around is the idea that drawing things in Fusion360 is easy if it's a part McMaster-Carr sells, so if I could build a clock entirely out of off the shelf parts, that would save design time, and also be interesting in of itself. Obviously I can't make the entire clock out of off the shelf industrial supply house parts, and I'm planning to make all the parts myself anyway. One of these days.

 

[pontiac428]

I think you're thinking small with the mechanical clock. How about a mechanical smartphone?!

 

[Lo-Fi]

I'd strongly suggest you watch the Clickspring Antikythera Mechanism series on YouTube. The larger gears are fabricated from concentric rings cut from one large sheet, with the centres being made from strip. It's a far more economical way to use a large sheet of expensive metal than making large blanks.

 

[dewbane]

If you make some of the gears from aluminum, you could get them anodized (or do it yourself) with different colors.

That has the potential to be cool, actually. What I use for gears doesn't really matter much in the scheme of things anyway. Let's be real. If I ever get it into adjustment once, it will be a miracle, and it won't stay in adjustment. They just never do. I'm not even really trying to make a clock that will run 24/7 for years on end. It just needs to run while I'm showing it off.

Well, my dividing head showed up two weeks early, and I've been fooling around with that today. For anyone considering a Chinese knockoff of a BS-0 dividing head, I can say the cheapest one from Amazon is a lot nicer than I would have hoped for the money. I got burned on my Chinese collet chuck, paying $200 more to get a "better" chuck, instead of buying the cheapest one, which happened to be sold by Shars at the time. When the chuck arrived, it literally had paperwork from Shars in the box. So this time, I skipped lining a middle man's pocket and bought right off the boat, as it were. The gamble seems to have paid off. I haven't got it dialed in yet, and certainly haven't used it for anything, but it seems to be capable of doing its job with adequate precision and repeatability.

I know I will hate cutting gears once I have cut a few and figured the process out, but I'm still really stoked anyway. I've been dreaming of being able to make gears for years, instead of buying commercial gears and building things with them for less time and less money, which would have been the sensible thing to do. Like my hero Fat Jimmy says, I do dumb things! Most of us do. Why buy a well-made part for $25 when you can spend $25,000 on equipment and 50 hours in the shop to make a barely serviceable approximation of the part in question? Exactly!

 

[ArmyDoc]

Why buy a well-made part for $25 when you can spend $25,000 on equipment and 50 hours in the shop to make a barely serviceable approximation of the part in question?

Amen.

 

[dewbane]

How about a mechanical smartphone?!

I spent way too long pondering that one. My phone's processor has 2.7 billion transistors. It's hard to translate that into a mechanical equivalent, but if it's just one cubic inch per transistor that's still 19.683 billion cubic inches, or 1,640,250,000 cubic feet.

One of Norfolk Southern's high cube 60' boxcars holds just under 7500 cubic feet, so we could fit this bad boy into a mere 218,700 boxcars. You know, so it can continue to be a mobile phone.

So a figure of 100 cars seems about right for a train under most circumstances,and that means a minimum of 2,187 locomotives pulling this damn thing. Norfolk Southern currently operates over 4,000 locomotives, so this Charles Babbage mobile phone is definitely plausible!

 

[dewbane]

I'd strongly suggest you watch the Clickspring Antikythera Mechanism series on YouTube.

I had forgotten all about that. If you can settle for something angular and basic, it's a cheap and easy way to cross out a wheel too. You could also do fancy curves, but simple crosses would use the minimum amount of material. He was also limiting himself to historical methods of joining things, while I have no such constraints. Very good suggestion!

 

[dewbane]

I'm going to step in here and say I am still chuckling at my may as well say 2,200 freight train "mobile phone." Not counting the locomotives, that would be roughly 2,500 miles long. It would span approximately from Boise, Idaho to New York City. Just to contain the mechanical computer equivalent of a smart phone processor.

I'm also going to give myself props, because when I entered that into Google Maps to check the distance, I started in NYC and pulled a random guess right out my butt for what would be about 2,500 miles, and bang, 2,543 miles to Boise.

How is it even possible that I'm still single after my wife left me? Women should be lining up around the block with pitch forks and sledge hammers to beat each other to death fighting to win my love.

Yeah, well, at least I have a shop dog, and a shop cat.

 

[homebrewed]

How is it even possible that I'm still single after my wife left me? Women should be lining up around the block with pitch forks and sledge hammers to beat each other to death fighting to win my love.

They're waiting for you in Boise, where men are men and so are the women. JOKING, I have family living in Boise.