Go Vintage! Learn To Repair And Restore Mechanical Pocket And Wrist Watches.

July 8, 2014 by Gregory L. Charvat 70 Comments

Until recently, watches have been entirely mechanical where each wheel, gear, and mechanism representing a milestone in our understanding of precision manufacturing and timekeeping.

One of the very first watches, created by a locksmith.

Today it is nearly impossible to find watchmakers to service or repair vintage mechanical pocket and wristwatches, so we have to do it ourselves. Learn to repair vintage mechanical watches. You can do this and we’ll show you how.

They tick, mechanical watches have a pulse. First created in the 16th century by locksmiths, these early watches could only resolve time down to the hour and for this reason displayed time with only one hour hand.

By the 18th century fusee technology enabled watches to achieve accuracies to within seconds.

Continue reading “Go Vintage! Learn To Repair And Restore Mechanical Pocket And Wrist Watches.” →

The Hour Of The 3D Printed Clock Draws Nigh

May 24, 2014 by Adam Fabio 15 Comments

Many have tried, but [Christoph Laimer] has succeeded in designing a working, (relatively) accurate clock nearly completely from 3D printed parts. Every gear, pulley, wheel and hand of [Christoph’s] clock is printed. Only a few screws, axles, a weight, and a string are non-printed. Even the crank to wind the clock is a 3D printed part.

[Christoph] designed his clock in Blender. It took quite a bit of design work to create parts that would work and be printable. Even more work was involved in printing over 100 failed prototype parts.

One might think that [Christoph] is using the latest printers from the likes of Makerbot or Utimaker to achieve this feat. It turns out he’s using a discontinued Rapman 3.2 printer. Further proof that even “older” printers are capable of great things! [Christoph] does run his printer rather slowly. Printing a single gear with 0.125 mm layers and a 0.4 mm nozzle takes him 2 or 3 hours.

Mechanically, the clock is gravity powered with an anchor escapement. Rather than a pendulum, [Christoph] chose to use a balance wheel and hairspring assembly to govern the escapement. Even the spring is printed from standard PLA. The weight is suspended from a pulley block. The clock isn’t particularly efficient. 70cm of height will run the clock for only 2 hours.

[Christoph’s] clock has proven to be accurate to within 1/4 second per hour. He hasn’t provided temperature stability data – but being PLA, we’d suggest not getting it too hot!

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LED Clock Looks Cool AND Tells Time

May 16, 2014 by Rich Bremer 7 Comments

Clocks have taken many forms of the years, starting with shadow clocks and sundials in Egypt around 3500 BC. Obviously, these could only tell the time while the sun was out. Water Clocks followed which could track time in the dark. Water Clocks are basically a bowl with a hole in the bottom. This bowl was set in a container filled with water. The water entered the bowl at a consistent rate and graduations on the inside of the bowl showed how much time had passed.

Mechanical clocks followed, as did quartz and the atomic clock. We have now entered a new era in time-telling, the Bamboo LED Clock. [Pascal] brings us this funky fresh chronometer all the way from Germany.

The front face is made from a bamboo pizza plate and gives the clock some modern minimalist pizzazz. A 1-meter long LED strip is attached to the circumference of the plate and contains 60 individually assignable RGB LED’s. An Arduino and Real Time Clock are responsible for the time keeping and coordination of the LED’s.

As you can see in the photo, 2 of the LED’s colors are used. The single red LED indicates the hour. The strip of blue LED’s show the minutes. If you’d like to build one of these [Pascal] has shared the Arduino code on his Instructables page.

1980’s Ingenuity Yields Mechanical Intervalometer

May 15, 2014 by Rick Osgood 12 Comments

DIY Intervalometer

Let’s go back in time to the 1980’s, when shoulder pads were in vogue and the flux capacitor was first invented. New apartment housing was being built in [Vince’s] neighborhood, and he wanted some time-lapse footage of the construction. He had recently inherited an Elmo Super-8mm film camera that featured a remote control port and a speed selector. [Vince] figured he might be able to build his own intervalometer get some time-lapse footage of the construction. He was right.

An intervalometer is a device which counts intervals of time. These are commonly used in photography for taking time-lapse photos. You can configure the intervalometer to take a photo every few seconds, minutes, hours, etc. This photographic technique is great when you want see changes in a process that would normally be very subtle to the human eye. In this case, construction.

[Vince] started out by building his own remote control switch for the camera. A simple paddle-style momentary micro switch worked perfectly. After configuring the camera speed setting to “1”, he found that by pressing the remote button he could capture one single frame. Now all he needed was a way to press the button automatically every so often.

Being mechanically minded, [Vince] opted to build a mechanical solution rather than an electronic circuit. He first purchased a grandfather clock mechanism that had the biggest motor he could find. He then purchased a flange that allowed him to mount a custom-made wooden disk to the end of the minute hand’s axle. This resulted in a wheel that would spin exactly once per hour.

He then screwed 15 wood screws around the edge of the wheel, placed exactly 24 degrees apart. The custom paddle switch and motor assembly were mounted to each other in such a way that the wood screws would press the micro switch as they went by. The end result was a device that would automatically press the micro switch 15 times per hour. Continue reading “1980’s Ingenuity Yields Mechanical Intervalometer” →

Handmade Acrylic Skeleton Clock Is An Impressive Feat Of Scroll Sawing

April 29, 2014 by James Hobson 25 Comments

For one of his mechanical engineering school projects, [Ben Murton] decided to design and build a clock from scratch — and while it may look like it was laser cut… He cut it out all by hand.

It’s a cross between the mechanical workings of an old Grandfather clock and a Skeleton clock — the goal was to have all movements visible to see how the clock operates. He designed it using Autodesk Inventor, and has provided the files online for anyone to use — He notes it would be especially easy to make if you have a laser cutter or CNC router!

Anyway, the clock is made out of 3mm thick acrylic, 5mm brass shafts, nylon string, some heavy weights (lead), and some nuts and screws. After printing out his CAD templates, [Ben] carefully used a scroll saw to cut out every gear and linkage — We’re impressed.

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A Reel To Reel Clock

February 12, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

Word clocks – time pieces that spell out the current time with words – are awesome. They’re usually entirely electronic, illuminating LEDs to display the time. Not this one. It’s a mechanical masterpiece that shows the current time in words using motors and 35mm film leader.

The mechanics of this clock are fairly simple: text is transferred onto 35mm film leaders with water slide decals, which are then rolled onto film reels. These film reels are mounted on stepper motors attached to a frame with Meccano. There are four film strips, making this a surprisingly similar a word clock but using motors instead of LEDs.

Because this clock was originally built in 2008, the electronics are a bit… strange through the lens of a post-Arduino skill set. [David] is using a homebrew BASIC Stamp with eight Step Genie ICs and MOSFETs for each motor. Calibration of the clock is handled by an IR detector and a mark on each piece of film leader.

It’s an impressive example of mashing up spare and surplus parts to make something cool, but unfortunately we can’t find a video of this clock in action. If you manage to find one, put a link in the comments and we’ll add it below.

Arduino Astronomic Clock Automates Lights

November 15, 2013 by Marsh 32 Comments

[Paulo’s] garden lights are probably a bit more accurately automated than anyone else’s on the block, because they use latitude and longitude clock to decide when to flip the switch. [Ed Note from the far future: this page no longer exists, but you can still read it on the Wayback Machine. The TimeLord library has also been superceded, so you’ll have some porting to do.]

Most commercial options (and hobbiest creations) rely on mechanical on/off timers that click on an off every day at the same time, or they use a photosensitive element to decide it’s dark enough. Neither is very accurate. One misplaced leaf obscuring your light-dependent resistor can turn things on unnecessarily, and considering the actual time of sunset fluctuates over the year, mechanical switches require constant adjustment.

[Paulo’s] solution addresses all of these problems by instead relying on an algorithm to calculate both sunrise and sunset times, explained here, combined with swiftek’s Timelord library for the Arduino. The build features 4 7-segment displays that cycle through indicating the current time, time of sunset and of sunrise. Inside is a RTC (real time clock) with battery backup for timekeeping along with an Omron 5V relay to drive the garden lamps themselves. This particular relay comes with a switch that can force the lights on, just in case.

Check out [Paulo’s] project blog for the full write-up, links to code and more details, then take a look at some other home automation projects, like the SMS-based heater controller or occupancy-controlled room lighting.