After looking at the millions of catalogs we get every Christmas time, I kept going back to the one that showed the gear clock shown here and thinking it would be a great project with a little improvement. I can never leave anything alone my wife says. After drawing out what I wanted to do, I set out making gear patterns from a little piece of software I downloaded a couple years ago called "Gear Generator". It was free and does exactly what I've needed over the last couple projects. Once you've figured out the gear size, tooth count, pitch, etc., it lets you print them out full size and you can use that as a pattern to glue up for cutting.Once I figured it all out, I printed out the patterns and attached them to 1/8" craft plywood. Most of the project will be made from that I believe. I figure I needed to make a 34-35 link chain. The 1/2" 'roller' section are oak doweling because the poplar I used at first usually had pretty rough edges once I cut the spacer to 5/32" to make room for the gear teeth. I made 3 gears: A large 18 tooth gear where the clock will mount behind and the gear will be able to move on the elongated clock shaft, a 12 tooth gear to act as the actually crankshaft gear and a 6 tooth gear that looks like the tension gear and will actually animate the gears and chain around the clock. I'm using a 3rpm motor, so I'm hoping the 6 tooth drive gear and the 18 tooth main gear will allow me to mark the 18 tooth gear as the second hand sweep. Theoretically it should work.
The clock mechanism has a 1" mounting shaft so I'm going to make a nylon sleeve to slide over the shaft once it's installed on the backing plate that will hold the 18 tooth gear allowing it to revolve around the clock movement. In front of the 18 tooth gear will be a clock face held in place so it doesn't move. I've made a couple different decals with clock faces on them and am not sure yet which I'll use.
The pictures show the progress so far.. I'll post more as I move along.
