W
e’ve featured a lot of clock builds, but this one, as the title suggests, is frickin’ amazing. Talented art student [Kango Suzuki] built this Wooden Mechanical Clock (Google translation from Japanese) as a project while on his way to major in product design. There’s a better translation at this link. And be sure to check out the video of it in motion below the break.
[Kango]’s design brief was to do something that is “easy for humans to do, but difficult for machines”. Writing longhand fits the bill, although building the machine wasn’t easy for a human either — he needed six months just to plan the project.
The clock writes time in hours and minutes on a magnetic board. After each minute, the escapement mechanism sets in motion almost 400 wooden cogs, gears and cams. The board is tilted first to erase the old numbers, and then the new numbers are written using four stylii.
The clock doesn’t have any micro controllers, Arduinos, servos or any other electronics. The whole mechanism is powered via gravity using a set of four weights. [Kango] says his biggest challenge was getting the mechanism to write the numbers simultaneously. While he managed the geometry right, the cumulative distortion and flex in the hundreds of wooden parts caused the numbers to be distorted until he tuned around the error.
[Kango]’s “Writing Clock” can be seen in the Tohoku University of Art and Design, from February 9th to February 14th, so if you are in that neck of the woods, do drop in and check it out. You might even catch him fine tuning his masterpiece.
Thanks to [Dave Ehnebuske] for sending in this tip.
Cool. It doesn’t sound like it has a very good rhythm, so i suppose it won’t keep very good time.
Some of the teeth will be slightly different so the speed at different parts through a minute might vary but the speed to make one revolution should remain fairly consistent.
Wow… that is amazing!
WOW! Hell of a nice job!
Rube Goldberg-esque
Rube Goldberg would be eaten by jealousy here.
Now how long before someone turns it into a 3D printable version.
3D print the whole clock every minute to show correct time. xD
if the files are available, not long at all :)
Wow, even high expectations asian father meme is impressed!
Certainly one of the most amazing clocks I’ve ever seen!
(sigh!) I wish my company firewall would let me access the video…
Maybe youtube gets through. This is the identical video: https://youtu.be/tQHKoDC9XVI
the Jacquet-Droz automaton is 240 years old and is a lot more impressive…
http://www.chonday.com/Videos/the-writer-automaton
Holy crap. That was amazing. To think it was accomplished 240 years ago. No electonics, and fully programmable. It’s almost spooky. This guy was way ahead of his time.
Don’t forget The Draughtsman and The Musician too!
(these are seriously cool! I’ve seen them all in person three times now, since the museum where they’re kept is only a couple of blocks from where I work :) )
That is pure mechanical beauty! Thanks for reminding us.
[obligatory] – Yeah, but its not a HACK.
Because all magnetic boards and pens do this???
+1
Awesome, and the resemblance to Totoro is remarkable …
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