New clock experiments, part 2

For the next round of work on the new clock, I changed the configuration to have a frame which is shorter overall, and with the escapement set off to one side.

There is nothing holding the end of the side piece in place so it tends to splay out a little, but will do for this phase. (The illustration shows one version of the design. I used different minute wheels and weight drums in the experiments.)

For the first test, I made a minute wheel with a winding drum built into it, and set the clock going. With a weight of 560g, it ran for a few minutes and then stalled. Raising the weight to 680g, it ran until the weight hit the floor. The weights were not chosen with any care: I use a water bottle, and it's just a result of how much water I put in it.

Theory says that for a 50mm drum, you should unwind the string at 15.7 cm per hour if the motion is continuous. This means that for a typical 1.5 m drop, you would get a run time of around 9.6 hours. It's not enough for a practical clock, but will do while I am experimenting. I also added a weight drum on a separate arbor with 3:1 gearing.

(Yes, I know the string is tangled round the gear. It's the only video I took before disassembling it and I noticed it too late. It wasn't tangled when I did the tests.)

The 3:1 gearing triple the run time to 28.7 hours. However, I didn't get this arrangement to run reliably. It would usually stall after 10-15 minutes, though I did have one run lasting an hour. The weight I was using was 1340g (the heaviest I could get with a water bottle), and this probably explains it. You would expect something more like three times 680g, that is about 2kg, would be needed. I think the frame may also have been starting to distort slightly. Initially when I tried using the 3:1 gearing, I added a 20 tooth gear on the minute arbor, such that both it and the minute wheel were held onto the arbor with set screws. I could not get them to hold tightly enough and one or other would slip. In the end I glued the two gears together, and if I use this in future, I'll print them combined.

Finally, I put together a rough version a weight drum with a ratchet. I thought this would be straightforward, but ended up going through several variants. Looking at other clocks, I see three main styles:

• the drum (which in all of these is within the diameter of the minute wheel) has a ratchet on on end, and there are pawls freely pivoted on the minute wheel. Gravity makes them drop into place. A lot of wooden clocks use this.
• the drum has a ratchet on the end and there are sprung pawls attached rigidly to the minute wheel.
• the ratchet is inside the wheel and the pawl are pushed outwards by spring. Used in Steve Peterson's SP5 (on a separate arbot).

The three styles are illustrated here:

(Credits: Jacque Favre Clock One, TheGoofy design on Thingiverse, Steve Peterson SP5).

I played around with the gravity approach for a bit, but found it hard to get the pawls to drop into place at the right time, and settled on using sprung pawls. They work at any position at any orientation and work well given that you can print thin springy plastic.

With a 50mm drum, I measured a weight drop of 8cm in 32 minutes, or about 15 cm/hour. There is something puzzling here as some other measurement showed quite different values. I also tried a drum 25mm in diameter. As expected, this halved the drop per hour. You would expect to have to increase the weight, but I got away with the same 680g, albeit with a rather weak tick. It would probably have stalled if I let it go on for longer.

I put the weight drum directly on the minute arbor for the tests I've just described. It is not a good way of doing things, as you really need the arbor with the weight to be supported at each end. That doesn't work well with some configurations of the hour train and works even less well if you are going to bring out a seconds arbor. As I mentioned before, a separate weight drum arbor with a 3:1 reduction didn't run without stalling, and so I decided to try 1:1 gearing. There should not be any problems with this, and indeed it worked fine. So this gives me the configuration I want to use for the next version, with the option that the 1:1 gearing could be changed.

Incidentally for some of these prints, I used a 0.6mm nozzle with an Arachne-based slicer (PrusaSlicer 2.5.0 alpha). Allegedly this gives as good precision as a 0.4mm nozzle. See Thomas Sanladerer's video for details. It seems to work well, though I still have a little bit of tuning to reduce stringing and blobbing, and it is more prone to producing elephant's foot. For now, it's good for faster prototyping, and I'll stick with 0.4mm when I want better accuracy.