A Practical Guide to Wooden Wheeled Clock Design

My Design Secrets Revealed

By Clayton Boyer

Copyright 2012

This book can be used in conjunction with the pictures and descriptions shown
on my website at www.lisaboyer.com

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Acknowledgements
Many thanks go out to a wonderful group of wooden clock builders whose help
and assistance in all things mechanical has been so incredibly helpful in
spreading this wonderful hobby; Bob Brown, Forrest Burnett, Jeff Hecht, John
Hilgenberg, Adrian Iredale, Drew Neagle, and Marc Tovar. My appreciation of
the various talents, and friendship of these builders cannot be overstated.

Introduction
My journey into wooden clock making began in the 1950’s. I was ten years old.

When I was young, I loved the How-To monthly magazines like Popular Science,
Mechanics Illustrated and Popular Mechanics. I loved them enough that I actually spent
my paper route money on monthly subscriptions. The payoff came while perusing the
pages of Popular Mechanics; it was an article on how to build your own wooden clock.

I have a special fondness for Popular Mechanics because not only did they introduce me
to the idea of wooden clock making but in 2010 they bestowed upon one of my designs
their “Backyard Genius Award”. That design is my Celestial Mechanical Calendar Orrery
and Popular Mechanics displayed it in their September 2010 issue. The journey came
full circle from the magazine initiating a love for all things mechanical to having one of
my designs featured in it.

However, at ten years of age pretty much all I could do was dream about building a
wooden clock. I had no tools, no money, no materials; nothing – except a new dream –
which was, as I found out many years later, actually quite fortunate because that article
contained enough errors that it may have completely frustrated the younger me.

Fast forward fifty years. I had retired from my practice, but an ember of the dream of
building a wooden clock was still smoldering in the recesses of a forgotten part of my
brain. I was looking through woodworking magazines and I saw a wooden clock
hanging on the wall in the background of a picture in an article about how to make shop
cupboards. The picture of that clock was like gasoline on the ember.

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I researched the few available clock designs on the Internet at the time, and decided
upon one that looked intriguing. I ordered it and waited. I’m not good at waiting and it
was agonizing (!), so I completely understand what you have gone through if you have
ever ordered one of my designs.

The clock plan finally came in the mail, and I started right in on it. A few days later I
emerged from my shop with a completed mechanism! How exciting! I stood there in
front of the clock anticipating the pride of showing off my project, but I could muster
none. It was big and blocky, and I said to myself, “Blind monkeys could design a better
looking clock than this.”

So I went in search of some blind monkeys and they have been designing for me ever
since. This is the story of how they do it…

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 Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 2

Introduction 2

Where to Start? 6

Galileo 8

Determine the Pendulum Length by Equation or Chart but Mainly by Experimentation

10

Calculating Wheel Ratios 14

How Many Wheel Arbors? 14

Naming the Wheels, and How the Train Works 15

Calculating the Wheel Ratios and Numbers of Teeth (The First Important Equation) 17

Driving Pinions for Date and Moon Phase 20

Another Example and a Neat Trick 21

And Yet Another Example and Another Consideration; The Four Arbor Going Train 22

Wheel Size, And Why It Matters…Inertia 23

Two Equations for Creating the Wheels; OD and PD 25

OD 25

PD and the Importance of (w) 26

Making the Center Wheel and Pinion Set 26

Making the Third Wheel Set 27

Run Time and Rewind 28

Radians 31

Wind or Great Wheel 32

Tooth Forms 33

Before CAD There Was the Index Board 36

Drawing a Pinion 39

Drawing the Escape Wheel 41

Drawing the Pallets 44

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 The Dial Train and its Hour Hand 50

Creating the Dial Train 53

Applying the Patterns 55

Wheels from Solid wood or Ply? 56

Arbors 58

Front to Back Alignment of the Wheels 59

Keeping the Wheels Accurately Spaced 61

Wheel Cut Outs 61

Balancing the Wheels 62

Lubrication 62

Finish on the Teeth 64

The Frame 65

Depthing 66

Laying Out the Wheels 67

Rewinding Systems 70

That One-Way Ratchet System; the Clicks 73

Hang-ups and Hook-ups, the Pendulum 75

The Mysterious Bob and Its Adjustment 78

Bob Adjustments 80

Bob Adjusting Stuff for the Perfectionist 81

Striking Mechanisms 83

Now That You Know All This…What Could Possibly Go Wrong? 86

The 8-Day Clock 87

A Few Thoughts About Other Possible Configurations For Our 8-Day 94

Bringing the 8-Day Clockworks Design Together 95

Glossary of Terms 100

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Where to Start?
Let’s say we have a great idea for a new wooden wheeled clock. We need to start
somewhere - but where? What would be a good starting place when designing a
wooden clockworks?

There are two approaches to answering that question. One is to start with the going
train, which are the “gears” that run the clock, and then, secondarily, decide what
pendulum to match with it.

The second way, and the way I favor, is to start with the pendulum and escape
mechanism of my choice, and then design backward to the train that they require. This
method gives us more freedom and flexibility in design because there are just so many
different escape-pendulum possibilities, and designing the train around them, I find, is
easier than starting with the train and then finding the pendulum that will go with it.

There is such a wonderful variety of pendulum and escape mechanisms to choose from;
for example, there is the always gyrating grasshopper escapement as seen on my
Swoopy and Bird Of Paradise designs. There is the fun and unique Ball and Thread
escapement as seen on my Flying Pendulum. Another completely different and
wonderful escapement is the gravity, and the gravity escapement itself comes in many
forms. One of the most recently developed forms of this escapement was created in the
1980’s by James Arnfield, and is a beautifully hypnotic escapement, a variation of which
you can see in both my Model T and Solaris clock designs. And there are hundreds
more escapement and pendulum combinations, however, the most commonly used
escapement in clock making, and one that I will later describe in detail how to draw, is
the Graham escapement.

I will also explain later, and in considerable depth, how to design the trains for almost
any mechanism that you have in mind and for the particular escapement and pendulum
that you choose to limit it.

Pendulums are simply timing devices. The most common is the kind of pendulum that
simply hangs straight down and has a weight or bob at the bottom end of it, yet even
these simple pendulums come in different lengths and configurations. The function of the
Pendulum is to set the rhythm at which the drive weight, which is that big chunk of rock

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you have hanging way over there at the other end of the going train, is let down slowly
and at a precise rate. The more accurately this timing device is at lowering the weight,
the more accurate the clock will be at telling time.

The evolution of the pendulum has always been to increase accuracy, but now that we
have the cesium atom clock in Colorado - which uses the periodic vibrations of a cesium
atom… a really small pendulum of sorts - sending out its signals and resetting all of the
atomic clocks around the country, we have nearly perfect time keepers available to us.
Because of this we are released from that whole “accuracy” thing and are allowed to
simply have fun with our designs. We can think of these wooden clocks more as kinetic
sculptures now that the pressure of accuracy has been removed…what a relief!

The first pendulum clocks were of a type that simply had a stick hanging horizontally,
usually across the top of the clock. In the picture of Wee Willie above, you can see the
horizontal stick above the clock and below the bell with the weights hanging from the
end of each arm.

The horizontal stick is called a foliot and it is usually attached to another stick, which is
oriented vertically, called the verge. Together they were hung in a balanced fashion from
a support above.

Flags or extensions are placed on the vertical verge stick; the flags get in the way of the
rods extending out from the clock’s crown wheel. The crown wheel would just like to
spin, but the flags on the verge keep getting in the way. First the top flag would stop a
crown wheel rod, then that rod would push that flag out of the way, but by doing so the
flag on the bottom would then contact the bottom rod of the crown wheel. This action

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would swing the verge first one way and then the other. It wiggled around and gyrated
and was a lot of fun to watch, but not very accurate.

Those first clocks were accurate to about +/- 20 minutes a day, but it was a start. My
Wee Willie and Horologium are good examples of this type of verge and foliot clock.

Adding a return spring to this type of pendulum increases its accuracy dramatically. You
will notice that the verge clocks that I design are not suspended from a single cord, as
the original clocks were. My verge is suspended from a loop that acts as a return spring
and increases the accuracy of my verge clocks dramatically, to about +/- 19 minutes a
day…Kidding! My friend John Hilgenberg has gotten his Horologium accurate to within
one minute a day, or about equivalent to a typical straight hanging pendulum clock.

Galileo
Then one day, back in about the year 1602, Galileo was sitting in church. He was tired
of getting there late because of his old, inaccurate verge clock. He was probably also
bored out of his mind, because he was concentrating on something a bit more
interesting; the church’s swinging incense globes above him.

Galileo noticed that each swinging globe had its own period depending upon the length
of the cord that attached it to the ceiling. He also noted that the period of the swing from
side to side was the same whether the swing had a large arc, or a small arc. He proved
this by timing the swinging globes with his own pulse. And since it was the middle ages,
it was also brought to his attention that most of the people sitting around him were in
need of a bath, which made him doubly thankful for the swinging incense globes.

With Galileo was born the idea of the straight hung pendulum that is so common and
recognizable today. Galileo also designed the first pendulum driven clockworks, but
never built it. The actual building of Galileo’s clock was left for later scientists. Below is
a drawing of Galileo’s original idea for his clockwork design. You may recognize a
vaguely similar escapement on my Cogitation kinetic sculpture.

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On a barely related topic, one day I was out on my morning bicycle ride and had an
epiphany – a brand new, never before clock design! At least, that’s what I had thought.
It was exciting! Coming up with something new always is.

When I got back home I drew it up and began working on creating it. This was going to
be good, I could tell. Part way into completing the mechanism, I realized that my
epiphany was simply an upside-down version of Galileo’s original escapement…only his
worked, and mine didn’t!

So I set about making some drastic changes to my original design. I changed the
escapement, got rid of the hands, and turned it from a clock into a beautiful kinetic
sculpture. Even though it didn’t work out to be a clock, I decided to keep the name I had
come up with after the realization of my upside-down escapement – Galileo’s Bicycle.

Okay, back to clocks…

For the next few centuries, clockmakers attempted to perfect the pendulum and
experiment with new clock escapements to create more and more accurate clocks.

The first clocks, created during the medieval times were of the verge and foliot type like
the Wee Willie that we discussed above, but after Galileo, and during the Renaissance,
clocks were the high-tech equivalent, and similar in station to that which the computer
holds today. With more accurate clocks scientists could more accurately measure the
movements in the heavens – which was a really big deal at the time.

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The pendulum clock could be constructed to be accurate to within seconds per day, and
most of the wooden clocks I have created fall into this category of being accurate to
within a few seconds per day…until, of course, the weather changes.

The Old Tymers had the same problems with changes in the weather, too, and they
developed all kinds of pendulum contraptions to compensate for it. Even with all the
improved contraptions and materials used in making modern pendulums, in any
comparison, wood still makes an excellent and extremely accurate pendulum shaft.

So we have mentioned horizontal pendulums and vertical pendulums, and we can also
have circular pendulums of many kinds, but the most common circular pendulum is the
balance wheel. The balance wheel really is simply a horizontal pendulum that takes the
shape of a circle. These can be hooked to many different escapement mechanisms
other than the old verge and foliot with the flags. The crown wheel of the old verge and
foliot clocks was replaced with more accurate, chronometer, or Swiss, or English lever
escapements allowing the balance wheel to be reduced down to a size where it could be
used in a wristwatch.

My Space Time Continuum sculpture uses a grossly enlarged watch escapement called
the ‘chronometer’, and is an example of a one tooth pallet escapement, which is quite
unusual. The more common escapements use two pallet faces, as we will discuss later.

Determine the Pendulum Length by Equation or

Chart, but Mainly by Experimentation
Once you have determined the type of pendulum you want for your clock, the next step
is to determine the rhythm or ‘period’ that pendulum will impart to the clock. For the
straight hanging pendulum that’s a relatively simple matter because the period for each
length of pendulum has been calculated for you already. Unfortunately, those theoretical
calculations do not always match with the actual period your pendulum will have. I have
found it best to make every pendulum a bit longer than suggested in these charts,
because it is a lot easier to cut off pendulum shaft than it is to add more onto it.

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Beats Per Length Beats Per Length
Hour (mm) Hour (mm)
9,000 159 5,000 515
8,900 163 4,900 537
8,800 166 4,800 559
8,700 170 4,700 583
8,600 174 4,600 609
8,500 178 4,500 636
8,400 183 4,400 665
8,300 187 4,300 697
8,200 192 4,200 730
8,100 196 4,100 766
8,000 201 4,000 805
7,900 206 3,900 847
7,800 212 3,800 892
7,700 217 3,700 940
7,600 223 3,600 994
7,500 229 3,500 1,052
7,400 235 3,400 1,114
7,300 242 3,300 1,183
7,200 249 3,200 1,258
7,100 256 3,100 1,340
7,000 263 3,000 1,431
6,900 271 2,900 1,532
6,800 279 2,800 1,643
6,700 287 2,700 1,767
6,600 296 2,600 1,905
6,500 305 2,500 2,061
6,400 315 2,400 2,236
6,300 325 2,300 2,435
6,200 335 2,200 2,661
6,100 346 2,100 2,921
6,000 358 2,000 3,220
5,900 370 1,900 3,568
5,800 383 1,800 3,975
5,700 396 1,700 4,457
5,600 411 1,600 5,031
5,500 426 1,500 5,725
5,400 440 1,400 6,572
5,300 459 1,300 7,622
5,200 476 1,200 8,945
5,100 495 1,100 10,645

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For a straight pendulum that has a period of one second, you’ll want about a 42”
pendulum overall – unlike what it says in the chart. Adrian adds, “I make mine 20%
longer than theory making mine 47” long first up!”

A pendulum of a certain length is always supposed to have the same beat, and it is
close, but no cigar. A theoretical pendulum length is calculated by the equation;

G
L T2
2

Where Length of the pendulum is shown in feet, T is the time from one tick to one tock
(one beat), and G is gravity at 32 feet/second squared, and Pi squared is 9.87, for
example let’s take a clock that ticks one time per second;

Length of the pendulum = 1 squared x 32 feet per second squared / 9.87 = 3.242 feet

Converting 3.242 feet in to inches = 38.9 inches, which is very close to the 39.1” shown
in many pendulum length charts.

Using that formula, however, I always came up with a pendulum that was TOO SHORT
so I add a few inches and make mine extra long figuring I can always cut them off.

To convert into inches the pendulum lengths that are shown in millimeters in the
chart above, simply multiply the millimeters by 0.03936.

By the way, if you prefer to use the above equation to find your pendulum’s length in
metric, as I have done in the chart above, you can always substitute 9.81 meters per
second squared for gravity in the L = T squared x G/Pi squared equation.

Although I used to use that calculation when I began making my clocks, later I was
looking through an old NAWCC Bulletin, and in it was an equation to calculate pendulum
length if you know the beats per minute (BPM) of the clock - which you could easily find
by counting cogs, or by taking the clock's beats per hour and dividing by 60 to get its
BPM. Square that number. Divide 141,220 by that squared BPM number and that's the
length in inches for the pendulum.

Take, for example, the 3600bph grandfather’s clock we will be designing. Divide
3600/60 = 60 bpm. 60 squared is 3600. 141220/3600 = 39.23". That is, again, a close
approximation to both the chart and our previous equation.

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Here is an example for a 5400bph clock. Divide 5400bph by 60 to get 90bpm. Square 90
= 8100. Then 141220/8100 = 17.43"...as long as you are not in a Vortex (my 5400bph
Vortex pendulum is about 21” long).

Remember, these are 'theoretical' pendulum lengths and the true length will be longer,
but starting with 45” for a 3600bph clock, or 22” for a 5400bph clock should certainly be
enough in most cases.

For quick metric estimates of pendulum length, substitute 3578.4 for the 141,220 that we
used in the equation above, and that will give you your theoretical pendulum length in
meters.

A one second period pendulum is the kind that is usual for a grandfather’s tall clock
mechanism. Since a grandfather’s tall clock is about the easiest to create, let’s find out
how to design one of them. Here are the steps;

1. Calculate the wheel ratios that will match with our pendulum and allow our
minute hand to go around one time per hour

2. Determine the wheel ratios we want in our clock

3. Draw them

4. Design the weight pulley and click systems

5. Create a frame

6. Assemble the clock

On the following page is the full view and to its right, an exploded view of the simple, 30
hour, grandfather’s clock we will be designing. We will be referring back to this drawing
in the following sections. Keep checking back to the drawing below for clarification, if
questions arise.

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Calculating Wheel Ratios
This next step requires us to do a little math to calculate the gears of a going train that
will match with a pendulum with a one second period. We’ll call that a ‘seconds’
pendulum. A seconds pendulum ticks one time per second. What we need to find out is
how many times it ticks in one hour.

1 second per beat, times 60 seconds per minute, times 60 minutes per hour is (1 x 60 x
60 = ) 3600 ticks, or beats, per hour.

Now that we know a seconds pendulum beats 3600 times per hour (that is called beats
per hour or bph) we can determine the many and varied gear trains to go along with that
particular pendulum. A note here…I used the word ‘gear’ a couple of times above, but in
clock making we use ‘wheel’ instead of ‘gear’, so I’ll try to keep with that from here on
out.

How Many Wheel Arbors?

At this point we need to determine how many wheel sets we will have in our going train.
A wheel set contains both a wheel and its matching pinion. A wheel set would
necessarily have to be placed upon two arbors; the wheel on one arbor, and the pinion

14
on a second arbor. Arbors are the rods that pass through the center of the wheel or
pinion, and allow the wheel or pinion to be mounted in or on a frame so that the wheel
and its matching pinion can turn freely.

My Radiance has one wheel that is impulsed once every two minutes, but that’s too
difficult a clock for us to begin with. Some clocks with very slow pendulums could have
two wheel sets. And as we will find out later, two wheel clocks are better candidates for
large wheels because fewer wheel sets decreases the inertia required throughout the
whole train. Also, because there are only two wheels in the train, you will usually need
to pack a whole lot of teeth onto just those two wheels. So big is good in this case.
However, here we will be designing a simple grandfather’s clock with a seconds
pendulum, and the traditional grandfather’s clock mechanism usually has three wheels in
its going train.

Naming the Wheels, and How the Train Works

As a reference, look back at the last drawing of the grandfather’s clock shown on the
previous page.

Starting at the drive weight end of the train, the three wheels of a simple going train are
usually named; the center wheel, the third wheel (I’ll explain in a moment why this is
called third wheel when it’s actually the second wheel in this train), and the escape
wheel.

The center wheel is so named because it is the center of the clock. The center wheel
arbor is generally where the hands of the clock are mounted. The center wheel arbor is
an important arbor on a simple grandfather’s clock because that is where the minute
hand is mounted, and that’s important because...

When people ask me how to go about designing a clock, I tell them “It’s easy. All you
have to do is get the minute hand to go around one time per hour, and the rest is
simple.” That’s our task – getting the minute hand to go around one time per hour, and
it’s also usually a good idea to have the hand going in a clockwise direction.

15
The center wheel in our three wheel train is usually firmly attached somehow to the
center wheel arbor, so that when we mount a minute hand to the arbor the movement of
the center wheel will turn the arbor that turns the minute hand.

The center wheel meshes with, and pushes upon, a pinion on the next arbor up the train
– the third wheel arbor. The third wheel pinion is firmly attached to the third wheel
through some kind of connector, so that when the third wheel pinion is moved by the
center wheel the third wheel itself is also moved. Notice here if the center wheel is
moving in a clockwise direction, the third wheel and its pinion will be moving in a
counterclockwise direction.

Even though it is only the second wheel in our going train, the third wheel is called the
third wheel because in a clock that is to run for a full day on a wind, there is usually a
wheel before the center wheel, called a wind, or great wheel, that has the drive weight
attached to it. The wind or great wheel is then counted as the first wheel of the train.
The wind wheel is not, however, a part of the calculations during this, the calculation-of-
the-going-train stage. Leave the wind wheel ratios out of any going train calculations.
The wind wheel is only there to increase run time, while the going train is there to get
that minute hand to go around one time per hour.

The third wheel in turn pushes upon a pinion attached to the next arbor up. That arbor is
the escape wheel arbor. The third wheel pushes the pinion on the escape arbor, and
because that pinion is attached to the escape wheel through a connector, that force also
then turns the escape wheel.

The escape wheel is a special wheel. You can see it looks different from any of the
other wheels used in the mechanism. The escape wheel is created separately to match
a certain type and kind of pallet. The pallets are, in some way, attached to the pendulum
shaft – either directly or through some kind of crutch system, and as the pendulum rocks
the pallets back and forth, the pallet faces first catch and release one tooth of the escape
wheel and then another, alternating back and forth, catch-release-catch-release, 3600
times per hour. Each time the pallets release, the escaping tooth of the escape wheel
imparts a little impulse, thus keeping the mechanism going.

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Calculating the Wheel Ratios and Numbers of Teeth
(Here Comes the First Important Equation)
The escape wheel can have almost any number of teeth, but the most common number
of teeth for the escape wheel of a grandfather-type clock is 30. Because there are two
pallet faces, each tooth of the escape wheel is counted twice in our calculations. So the
designation for a 30 tooth escape wheel will appear as 30(2) in the equation. Most
pallets have two contact faces, so most of your calculations will use the 30(2) format.
However, some escape systems do use only one pallet face, but, like the chronometer
escapement I mentioned above, however, they are extremely uncommon.

So in our going train we have the center wheel pushing the third wheel pinion, which is
attached to and is thus turning the third wheel. The third wheel is then pushing the
escape wheel pinion, which is attached to and is turning the escape wheel. Also you will
note here that the escape wheel is now turning the same direction as the center wheel
and minute hand. With this type of three wheel train you have the option of adding a
seconds hand to an extension of the escape arbor, and have that seconds hand showing
on your clock’s face.

Now that we know the beats per hour of our pendulum (3600), and we know how many
wheels we have in our going train (3 sets), what kind of numbers (how many teeth) do
we need in our going train for this mechanism to match its pendulum?

All we need to go forward with our project is to determine how many teeth the pinions
will have - and just so you know, teeth on a pinion are actually called “leaves”(?) Don’t
ask me. I didn’t make this stuff up. However, for simplicity and ease of understanding,
I’m going to keep calling them teeth.

For our calculations, you can choose any number of teeth for your pinions, but the best,
most smooth running pinions have 10 or 12, or more teeth (leaves). But as your
calculations will later show, the more teeth your pinion has, the more teeth your wheel
must have to keep their proper ratio - and that means: the more teeth you’ll have to cut.
So to minimize the number of teeth we will be required to cut, we need to minimize the
number of teeth on our pinions, but we try to do that without sacrificing the smooth
running action of our mechanism.

17
Most of my pinions have 8 teeth as a highly functional compromise; so let’s use that
number for calculating our first going train. A simple mathematical equation will help us
determine the number of teeth our center wheel and third wheel must have, and since
we know we have a 30T (that stands for ‘teeth’) escape wheel, our equation to find the
number of teeth, (n), for the rest of the train will look like this;

(n) / 8x(n) / 8x30(2)  3600bph

And we solve for (n)

(n) 2 / 64 x60  3600bph

(n) 2  3840

(n)  61.967733

If we take the square root of 3840 we get 61.967733 teeth for each of the center and
third wheels.

Since it’s a bit difficult to cut 0.967733 of a tooth, 61.967733 teeth per each wheel won’t
work out for us very well. We are going to have to find a pair of numbers that are close
to that number but work out in our equation.

64 and 60 are commonly used, and are closest to (n) in this case, but other
combinations will also work (for example; 80 x 48).

Our equation is now; 64T center wheel pushes an 8 tooth pinion on the third wheel arbor
that turns a 60T third wheel that pushes an 8T pinion on the escape wheel arbor and our
escape wheel has 30T, each tooth of which is being acted upon twice by the pallets.
That gives us the needed 3600 beats per hour to match with our seconds pendulum.

64/8 x 60/8 x 30(2) = 3600bph

We can play with that equation and substitute for a 7 pinion and an 8 pinion, or a 10
pinion and a 12 pinion to find the number of teeth required to match the beats per hour
pendulum. We can also change the beats per hour pendulum – they are all variable and
can work just as well for whichever design we care to create. Here are a couple of

18
examples. In the first example we will exchange a 7 pinion for one of the 8 pinions in the
above example.

(n)/8 x (n)/7 x 30(2) =3600

(n) Squared = 3360

(n) = 57.9655

57.9655 is not a number that gives us an even number of teeth, but it gives us a starting
point to calculate the number of teeth our wheels will need.

Try dividing 3360 by 58…nope, that doesn’t work. That gives us 57.93, and we are
looking for a whole number. So we can try dividing 3360 by 60. Yes! That works. That
tells us our other wheel will need to have 56 teeth.

60/8 x 56/7 x 30(2) = 3600 is one of the options we could use to make a clock that beats
one time each second.

Did you also notice that by removing just one tooth on one pinion that we were able to
reduce the number of teeth in our wheels by 8? That’s nine less teeth to cut! Woo Hoo!

A problem comes in when we try to reduce the number of teeth on our driven pinions by
very much more. The train has a difficult time pushing pinions of small tooth counts. If I
ever use a 6 or 7 tooth driven pinion, I usually create it as a “roller trundle” pinion. That
is a pinion that is made of rods that have roller tubes over them to reduce internal
friction. My Vortex and Floating Wheel designs use this type of roller trundle six tooth
pinion.

19
Driving Pinions for Date and Moon Phase
The above is true for low tooth count pinions that are being driven by wheels. Driving
pinions, on the other hand, are pinions that have the reverse action; instead of being
driven by a wheel, they act by driving a wheel, and these driving pinions can have as few
as one tooth.

Driving pinions are sometimes used to change a date wheel, or a moon phase wheel.
For example the hour wheel of our dial train (explained in detail later) goes around twice
per day. If a pin, or ‘driving tooth’ were added to the back of the hour wheel, and made
to mesh with another 62T wheel, we could use that wheel to show us the day of the
month (31 day month x 2 rotations of the hour wheel per day = 62T required for our day-
of-month wheel). You may see this kind of date wheel on some older wooden clocks.
Of course this type of date indicator is only correct for 31 day months. It must be
corrected for the months with less than 31 days. That is usually an easy task (if one
remembers) by simply turning the 62T wheel to the correct date at the end of every short
month.

A similar arrangement can be made for indication of the moon’s phase by using a 59T
wheel being run from that same single tooth on the hour wheel. There are
approximately 29.5 days in the moon’s cycle, and our hour wheel with that single tooth
rotates twice per day. 29.5 X 2 = 59T. Again, it’s not perfect. The moon’s phase is

20
actually 29.530588853 days, meaning that the moon phase indicator on our clock would
need to be reset a few times a year.

There is a much more accurate moon phase indicator on my Celestial Mechanical

Calendar Orrery. The moon phase ball on that mechanism is only off one moon phase
day in 3 years and 4 months. That means the moon phase ball would need to be reset
only about every decade.

Before we move on, just for fun, let’s solve for a going train using all 12T pinions, and
see what difference that makes in our tooth count. Keeping the escape the same, we
have:

(n)/12 x (n)/12 x 30(2) = 3600

(n) Squared = 8640

(n) = 92.95 or about 93T per wheel

96/12 x 90/12 x 30(2) = 3600 works out perfectly.

That’s a nice, smooth running train and you’ll only need to cut 70 more teeth than in a
train using all 8T pinions! Yikes!

Another Example and a Neat Trick

Say we wanted to change the pendulum’s length. We have a space where a long
pendulum might get in the way, or we simply want a smaller clock. How about
shortening the pendulum so that it beats two times a second, or 7200 beats per hour?
(3600 x 2 = 7200)

Staying with our three wheel train, the calculation might look something like this:

(n)/8 x (n)/8 x 30(2) = 7200bph

Solving for (n) we get (n) = 87.63

Now you can solve for some even numbered wheels like we did before, or how about a
neat trick? 87.63 is almost 88. How about we make both wheels 88T? Our final

21
calculation will not equal 7200 beats per hour though, will it? That’s okay. I’ll show you
why.

88/8 x 88/8 x 30(2) = 7260bph

That means we’ll need to get 60 extra beats from the pendulum every hour to make this
train operate properly. Where can we get 60 extra beats (one extra minute) per hour?

On the bottom of the pendulum shaft is the bob, and under the bob is a regulating nut.
Turn the nut and lower the bob and the clock beats slower. Turn the nut and raise the
bob and the clock runs faster. A slight adjustment of that nut so that the bob is just
slightly higher than it would be for a 7200bph train will give us the extra 60 beats per
hour that we require for the 88/8, 88/8 train to make the minute hand rotate once per
hour

And Yet Another Example and Another Consideration:

The Four Arbor Going Train
How about some more examples of variations you may want to try out?

When you want to use a shorter pendulum, or use smaller wheels, you may want to add
another arbor to your going train so that you don’t have to keep cutting those high tooth
count wheels. For example, you may not want to cut two wheels with 88 teeth each.
Remember however, that if you do add another arbor that your escape wheel will be
running counterclockwise and you cannot add a seconds hand to that arbor…well, you
could, but it would not be turning in the conventional direction. Ah, what the heck? Go
ahead and add it! It’s your clock!

That additional arbor that we are adding is, by tradition, called the fourth wheel arbor and
it goes in between the third wheel arbor and the escape arbor.

Let us keep our pendulum the same seconds period pendulum we used in the first
example above and see what kind of numbers we come up with for the teeth on each
wheel of a four arbor train. We will also keep the 30T escape wheel and 8T pinions the
same. The equation for that then becomes;

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(n)/8 x (n)/8 x (n)/8 x 30(2) = 3600bph. Reduced down, that equation becomes; (n)
cubed = 30720

Solving for (n) will require a cube root calculator or table (or using the y x key on your

1
calculator where y is 30720 and the exponent is ).
3

(n) = 31.3189 and that will give us an approximate number to begin our search.

So again we will need to find three numbers that will equal 30720 when multiplied
together, and be around 31 teeth each for our train.

In this case 32 x 32 x 30 = 30720 works giving us a train with all 8T pinions that will
operate properly with our seconds pendulum, and with a lot less tooth cutting. From our
previous example; 64 + 60 = 124 teeth, while here 32 + 32 + 30 = 94 teeth, but we do
still have to add back 8 teeth for the extra pinion, so that’s a total of 102 teeth to cut. But
by having the 4th arbor, we still saved having to cut those extra 22 teeth. One might then
think that eventually, if we add enough arbors to our clock, we won’t need to cut any
teeth at all! Unfortunately, that’s not the case, and we also need to remember that every
arbor increases the internal friction of the mechanism.

In the 1700’s, four wheel set wooden clocks were very common because the wooden
wheels could be made very small in diameter to compete with the metal wheel clocks in
Europe at the time. Why didn’t early American clockmakers make their clocks with metal
wheels like their European competitors? The reason is that England had restricted
metal shipments to the colonies. The Americans were a bit testy at the time, and the
English didn’t want that metal coming back at them as bullets.

Wheel Size, and Why It Matters; Inertia

Now we need to decide what size we want our wheels to be, which determines how far
apart our arbors will be. I realize there is an impulse, especially among us males, to
make really big wheels, and that leads us to an equation for inertia you might find
helpful.

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Inertia is significant because every time the clock beats, the escape wheel stops, and
then has to start again. Inertia is defined as the resistance of any physical object to a
change in its state of motion or rest. What that means is inertia resists every time the
clock starts, AND every time the clock stops. We can see the effects of inertia at the
pendulum as the escape wheel impulses it, and we can hear the inertia when the escape
wheel stops against the side of the pallets – “Tick!”

Inertia is an extremely important consideration when designing a clockworks because

the particular clock we are designing stops and starts 3600 times an hour, or 86,400
times a day, or 604,800 times a week, or 31,556,926 (that’s 31 ½ Million times) per year.

As a side note; as of June 2012 my Number Six clock has been ticking away, flawlessly,
for ten years. That’s over 315 million ticks and tocks!

The equation for inertia that we need to keep in mind is;

Inertia  MassxRadius 2

This equation shows us that there is a direct relationship between mass and inertia. But
the really important part of this equation shows us that inertia is proportional to the
SQUARE of the radius of the wheel. That means we have a lot of room to play with the
mass – it is a 1:1 ratio, but a small change in the radius creates a dramatic change in the
amount of inertia either given up when the train stops, or is required to start the train
again when the train is allowed to go.

We all love big wheels, but big wheels mean a lot of inertia, and a lot of inertia means
that the drive weight for our big wheel clock may need to be something like a
Volkswagen…which may look kind of cool if you had a wall high enough to hang it on.
Designing the rewind might be a bit tricky though.

When it comes to wheels, size matters, and inertia is also compounded throughout the
train. So a two wheel train with large wheels might require the same inertia as a three
wheel train with somewhat smaller wheels.

My Radiance, a one wheel clock, requires very little drive weight to overcome the
resistance of inertia. You’ll see what I mean when you check out the size of Radiance’s
drive weight.

24
But sometimes you want big wheels. Let’s see how to calculate various sizes of wheels
and pinions and how to figure out the arbor centers required between them.

Two Equations for Creating the Wheels; OD and PD

I use two equations for creating my wheels. One is for the wheel’s Outside Diameter
(OD) and one is for the Pitch Diameter (PD).

The pitch diameter (PD) is an interesting concept. Imagine you had two simple, round,
smooth wheels (no teeth) with their edges touching each other so that turning one would
turn the other. That edge on each wheel is the PD. But for gears, that smooth edge
would have a tendency to slip, so to prevent slippage, we need to add teeth to our
smooth, round wheels.

The part of the tooth that is carved out below the PD is called the dedendum (as in
‘deduct’), and the part of the tooth that extends beyond the PD is called the addendum
(as in ‘addition’). Together they make the tooth and space above and below the PD.

OD
The OD of the wheel is the circle that would be formed around the outside tips of the
addendums. The equation for the OD is;

OD  PD /( n) /( n  2)

Where (n) is the number of teeth on the wheel.

If you know the number of teeth on the wheel and the OD you could calculate the PD, or
if you only had the PD and the number of teeth on the wheel, you could calculate the
OD. The latter is what we will be using mainly, but let’s set it aside until we figure out
how to determine the PD from a given OD.

25
PD and the Importance of (w)
The equation for the PD is;

PD  ((n) x(w)) / 

Where (n) is again the number of teeth on the wheel, (w) is the width of the tooth and the
space next to the tooth, and pi is 3.1416. I want to emphasize here that (w) is the
measurement of the tooth and the space next to it, measured on the curve that defines
the pitch diameter, PD.

In designing, usually I am first solving for (w). If you use the same (w) throughout your
mechanism, all of your wheels and pinions will fit together and the pinions of the same
tooth count will be interchangeable. Having the same (w) throughout your clock is,
however, not necessary. What IS necessary is that a wheel and pinion set have the
same (w). The wheel and the pinion of a set will, of course, be on different arbors. For
example the center wheel’s pinion will be on the third wheel arbor.

Making the Center Wheel and Pinion Set

Let’s make a wheel and pinion set and find the distance required between their arbors.
We will start with the center wheel set, the 64/8 set, used in the first example. Let’s also
say that I want my wheel to fit onto a single letter size page, just for convenience. That
would mean the wheel’s width needs to be less than 8 ½ inches. I’ll give my wheel a
7.5” diameter so I can print it on a standard 8½ inch width page.

That gives us an OD of 7.5”. What is the required PD? Using the equation of OD =
PD/n/n+2 we get 7.5=PD/64/66. PD = 7.2727267 and we’ll round that off to, PD = 7.27,
and now we can stick that into our equation for the PD to find (w) so we can make a
pinion that will match it.

26
PD = (n x w)/pi gives us 7.27 = (64 x w)/3.1416 thus (w) = 0.3568659. Remember that
(w) is the width of the tooth plus the space on one side of it. So the tooth and space in
this case are almost 3/8” in width. Those are nice size teeth for our wooden clock.

Let’s round up the (w) to 0.36 and figure out what PD our pinion will have. Here is the
equation for the pinion… PD = (8 x 0.36)/3.1416 and it gives us a PD for the pinion of
0.9167, or about 0.92” diameter. Again, we have a nice diameter for a wooden pinion.

Now that we have the PD for both the wheel and pinion set, we can find their arbor
centers by adding together their PD’s and dividing by two. 7.27 + 0.92 = 8.19” divide by
two and get centers of 4.1”. That means that the center wheel arbor and the third wheel
arbor need to be spaced exactly 4.1” apart for this wheel set to operate optimally.

Making the Third Wheel Set

We now know that the distance from the center wheel arbor to the third wheel arbor in
our project is 4.1”. To find out how far apart the third wheel arbor and the escape arbor
must be we will again use the numbers from the first example, but we first must
determine how large we want our third wheel to be. The third wheel cannot conveniently
be larger than the center wheel. Making each wheel up the train the same size or
slightly smaller than the previous wheel prevents that wheel’s teeth from hitting the
previous wheel’s arbor. Thus the third wheel that we are making can be the same size,
or smaller than the center wheel. In our calculations our center wheel had 64T and our
third wheel had 60T.

To demonstrate what having four fewer teeth on our 3rd wheel does to its size, we will
use the same (w) as in the center wheel set example above. That way we can also
interchange the 8T pinions and don’t have to keep it straight in our mind as to which
pinion goes with which wheel set because the pinions will be identical.

Remembering that our third wheel had 60T, and mated with an 8T pinion we can use the
same (w) and do the calculations for their arbor distances.

PD = (60 x 0.36)/3.1416 gives us a PD for the third wheel of 6.875”, and we can round
that to 6.88”. That makes the third wheel slightly smaller than the center wheel and it will

27
be of an appealing size in relationship to it. And best of all, it won’t hit the center wheel
arbor.

We can use the same pinion calculations from above because our tooth count and (w)
are the same, so let’s add 6.88 + 0.92 and then divide by two to get 3.90” between the
third wheel arbor and the escape wheel arbor.

Just for fun, now that we know the PD, what is the OD of our third wheel?

OD = PD/n/n+2

OD = 6.88/60/62 = 7.11” outside diameter

Run Time and Rewind

Now that the center wheel and third wheel sets have been completed, we have a couple
more wheels that need to be discussed. I am going to save the escape wheel and its
design until later, and now discuss why we might want to add a wind, or great wheel to
the bottom of our going train.

Most of my designs have the weight cord wrapped around a wind pulley barrel that is
one inch in diameter. The wind barrel is the center of the wind pulley, which is part of
the rewind system. A wind pulley barrel smaller than that may not have the leverage to
properly run the train, and as we will show later, a larger diameter wind pulley barrel
would have a larger circumference that would cause the drive weight to be lowered so
quickly that we would not get an adequate run time with each winding.

The rewinding system usually consists of a wind pulley with a one-way click gear
attached that then meshes with some kind of restraining click system. The click system
allows the wind pulley to be freely rotated in one direction only. The other direction of
rotation is locked to the wheel and is what sends the force from the drive weight through
the clock’s train. Because each tooth of a click gear must hold the entire drive weight of
the clock, the click gear needs to be suitably strong. I always recommend making the
click gear out of the best high quality plywood one can find. Solid wood clicks are almost
certainly doomed for failure when a click aligns with the straight grain. Avoid these

28
critical failures by making your click gears from high quality plywood, and also gluing and
pinning the gear to its wind pulley.

We will want our simple clock to be wound one time per day. With a one inch diameter
wind pulley barrel, how far must the drive weight drop for our clock to run one full day?

Actually, it is best to design the clock to run a little longer than just 24 hours. That gives
you a grace period in which to wind your clock. Usually we try to have our clocks run for
about 30 hours on a wind. So to restate the question above, how long does our wind
cord need to be to have our clock run for 30 hours?

A one inch diameter wind barrel has a circumference of Pi, or 3.1416”. That means that
for every one rotation of the minute hand on our clock, at least 3.1416” of cord is
required. In other words, the weight drops at least 3.1416” per hour. Let’s multiply that
by 30 hours and see how far our weight needs to drop to run our clock that long…

29
3.1416 x 30 hours = 94.25”. That is almost eight feet. Even if your wall was that tall, it
would be inconvenient to rewind your clock every day if it were mounted that high up
your wall. You would need to bring in a ladder each day…which reminds me of a story
about Thomas Jefferson.

Having a clock in your home in Thomas Jefferson’s day was quite a status symbol.
Jefferson wanted a clock in his dining room that would run a week on a wind. One way
to increase run time on a clock, as we mentioned above, is to mount the clock higher on
the wall. Jefferson mounted a clock in the dining room of his home in Monticello way up
at the ceiling. He had the clock’s drive weights running out to the corner of the room and
down the wall, where he had painted on the wall the days of the week with Monday at
the top. Every Sunday he would come in with his ladder and wind the clock.
Unfortunately, Jefferson calculated the radians on his wind pulley barrel incorrectly, so
that his clock would only run for six days until the weight was on the floor. To solve this
problem Jefferson drilled a hole in his dining room floor for the weight to pass through,
and now Sunday is in the cellar. Owing to the genius of Jefferson, this story always
makes me feel a bit better when I make a blunder in my clock designs.

There are a couple of ways around mounting your clock at ceiling level, and the simplest
way is to add a pulley to the weight cord. The drive weight then hangs from a pulley that
hangs from a loop in the weight cord. By adding such a weight pulley system, you will
double the run time for the same distance of weight drop. Of course, you will also need
to double the drive weight over what it was when you were running your clock without
the pulley. A weight pulley will allow us to cut in half the amount of drop required for the
clock we designed above.

30
Our straight weight drop clock needed eight feet of cord – and don’t forget to add the
length of the weight itself to your calculations. If your drive weight is a foot long, you will
need a total of nine feet of drop for the above example. But with the doubling weight
pulley system, you can cut that drop distance in half. Now you only need about 4½ feet
of drop. That’s a convenient and manageable amount of drop.

Radians
I might also mention here that, unlike Thomas Jefferson, we also should consider that
the apparent diameter of the wind barrel will almost certainly increase when we are
rewinding our clock, as we wrap more and more wind cord onto it. At a full wind we may
find that the original 1” diameter barrel has now grown to 1.75” in diameter with all the
cord wrapped onto it.

That means that in the first hour more than 3.1416” of weight drop will occur. A 1.75”
diameter wind barrel now will have a circumference of about 5½ inches. That means
that the first hour our clock runs after being fully wound, the weight will drop 5½”, an
almost 2⅜” additional drop on a full wind. If we don’t compensate for this, we may end
up with Jefferson’s problem.

31
Wind or Great Wheel
Another way to make your clock run longer on a wind is to add another wheel set to the
train; a wind, or great wheel – you will see it called by both names. These can be made
in different gear ratios. The weight pulley gave us an extra 2:1 ratio, but wind wheels
can be created in any desirable gear ratio. Just remember the doubling of the drive
weight we needed for the pulley above applies here too. If you put a 6:1 ratio wind
wheel on your clock, you will necessarily need to add six times the original drive weight.
We are getting back into the Volkswagen range again…especially if you love those large
wheels.

Most of my designs that have a wind wheel use a 3:1 gear ratio, and some are only 2:1.
Remember also when designing your wind wheel that it may need to be the same size,
or just a little bit larger in diameter than the center wheel. However, you can go smaller
if you add a second frame member, similar to what I did on the wind wheel for the
Number Six clock design.

Let’s calculate a 3:1 ratio wind wheel set for our clock. I could continue on with making
all my tooth sizes the same (w) we used before, which was 0.36, But that would mean I
would have to create a wheel larger than my center wheel that already has 64 teeth on
it.

Instead, I’m still going to create my wind wheel so that it also fits onto a single letter size
page, but this time I’m going to create it from a different value for (w).

I will make my wind wheel 8” in diameter and have it be 60T pushing a 20T pinion that I
will attach to the center wheel with a connector. Since we’ve done this quite a bit before,
I’ll just do the numbers without a lot of explanation…

8”OD = PD/60/62 = PD = 7.74”

7.74”PD = 60T x (w)/ pi = (w) =0.4

Now to find the 20T pinion,

PD = 20T x 0.4w / pi = PD 2.58”

32
Total the PD’s 7.74 + 2.58 = 10.32” and divide by 2 to find the center of 5.16” between
the wind arbor and the center arbor for our 60/20, 3:1 ratio wind wheel set.

Just for fun, take a look at my Genesis. It uses neither a weight pulley nor a wind wheel.
Can you figure out how I designed that clock to run for 30 hours on a wind with a single
weight dropping straight down?

Answer: Genesis’ escape wheel has twice the normal number of teeth, thus everything
turns twice as slowly. That way there is no need for a doubling weight pulley, and this
arrangement reduces drive weight in two ways. 1) No doubling of the drive weight is
required because no weight pulley is used, and 2) no extra drive weight is necessary
because the same amount of drive weight is required for an escape wheel of the same
diameter with any number of teeth.

Tooth Forms
We have discussed all of the wheels in our train that have the common form of teeth.
The escape wheel has a different tooth form and we’ll discuss that later, but right now
we need to determine what the tooth forms will look like throughout our going train.
There are many variations in tooth form. For the purists involute vs. cycloidal usually
pops up, however we are not going to worry about any of the technicalities about tooth
form here. If it works - I’m happy. Hopefully that is your philosophy as well. If not, there
are lots of places you can do more in-depth research into the various tooth forms.

Right now, just go look at a bunch of clock wheels and check out their tooth forms and
see what appeals to you. Do you like the mechanical look of typical metal-equipment
type spur gears? Or maybe you like rounded top (addendum) teeth, or curved
teeth…whatever you like, just draw it and see if it works! It probably will. These clocks
are very forgiving. And, just for fun, remember that since our clocks only run in one
direction, only one side of the tooth is ever used. You could change the other side of the
tooth to look any way you’d like. Our clock teeth do not need to be symmetrical from
side to side, because only one side of the tooth is ever used.

33
That is also an important point to remember during the “depthing” stage, when you may
be filing some teeth down for a better fit with your pinion. If my teeth are binding, I
usually try to remove the excess off of the back, or non-driven, part of the tooth.
Removing wood from the front of the tooth will change the degree of tooth spacing you
worked so hard to achieve in the previous calculations.

The last two teeth in the row above would only be pushing from the right side for a wheel
turning clockwise, as in the center wheel pushing its pinion on the third wheel arbor. The
two tooth forms in the center would best be used with the roller trundles we discussed
back on page 20, but could be used with regular pinions also.

Notice also the PD lines are included in the tooth forms so that the tooth forms can be
aligned with the PD of your pattern blank when using the indexing board (shown in the
next section).

For those of us with CAD, generating wheels is really pretty simple. First you’ll do the
calculations we did above to find the PD and OD, and (w), and then draw a tooth form
that you like using those measurements.

In drawing your tooth form, remember that (w) was the width of the tooth and the space?
Well, they are not equal; the tooth actually needs to be just a little bit narrower than the
space. I usually make my tooth about 0.02” to 0.03” smaller and then add that distance
back to widen the space. The total (w) stays the same but there is now plenty of room in
the enlarged space for the narrowed tooth. This eliminates binding of the tooth inside
the space…well, theoretically anyway.

The equation for determining the actual tooth width for the size wheels we are making
here would be;

wT = (w/2) – 0.03”

34
We can then use the calculated wT as the width of our tooth form at the PD. We can
also use wT as the diameter of the tooth when we are making the matching pinion. I will
discuss that more in the section on drawing the pinion.

It should be noted that in making very small wheels the amount subtracted from each
wheel’s tooth might be larger. For example on a 3” diameter wheel with 64 teeth, I might
make the teeth smaller than (w) by only 0.035”. Or I might go down to 0.02”, or smaller,
for clearance on the teeth of a three foot diameter wheel.

Once you have drawn a tooth form that you like with the proper wT, remember also that
you’ll need the addendum to be above the PD up to the OD, and a dedendum below the
PD a bit more than the distance from the PD up to the OD so that the matching tooth
does not bottom out at the dedendum. In other words, give your dedendum a bit more
depth than the height of your addendum.

If you will be using an indexing board (explained in the next section), we will be aligning
the PD of your tooth form with the PD of the wheel you will be drawing. So, in any case,
be sure to include the PD on your tooth drawing.

Now that you have your tooth form with its PD, divide 360 by the number of teeth in your
wheel to get the degrees of rotation you’ll need between each tooth. Let’s take the
center wheel with the 64T from the above example.

360 degrees / 64 teeth = 5.625 degrees per tooth

For those of you drawing in CAD, using the center of your wheel to rotate around, grab
the tooth you drew and rotate it 5.625 degrees and copy it once. Now you have two
teeth that look like the old David Letterman’s smile, with a giant space between them.
You can simply draw a straight line between the bottoms of those two dedendums, or
put in a curve to your liking. Erase the rest of that second tooth, and copy the first tooth
with the dedendum connector, and keep rotating and copying (63 more times) until
you’ve completed that wheel. Easy, huh?

For those of us that do not have CAD, I can think of two ways to generate these wheels.
First, use an online gear generator (yes, “gear”. That’s what the machine guys call
them). That’s the easy way. Or, second, and this is the way I started making my
wooden clocks, is to create an indexing board.

35
Before CAD there was the Index board
If you have CAD you can skip this section, and zip down to the section on “Drawing a
Pinion.”

Shown below is an example of the Indexing Board I used to create my first clocks. The
drawing shows the Indexing board set up to create the third wheel of our grandfather’s
clock. There is a removable stop pin restricting the movement of the rotating arm so that
the tooth form can be created upon the PD that has been drawn on the paper that is
centered on the board. The circumferential holes shown on the drawing are shown in
degrees, but to create this board from scratch we will need to calculate the distance
apart each hole is on the actual diameter circle you choose to use on any specific board.
In other words, the distance between the evenly spaced holes for a 10” diameter circle
will be different from the distance between the holes of a 23” diameter circle. I will
describe below how that is done.

36
My indexing board was ¾” in thickness and about 24” in diameter, but the bigger the
better – and more accurate your wheels will be. There was a central hole from which I
drew ever larger diameter concentric rings. The largest ring would be for the wheel with
the largest number of teeth – usually the center wheel. So out about 11½” from the
center, I made a circle (23” diameter). The larger the diameter the circle, the more
accurately the teeth on the wheel can be laid out. Since I would be making a 64T wheel
from that circle, I needed to divide the circumference of that 23” diameter circle evenly
into sixty-four sections.

Circumference = 2Pi x radius

C = 6.2832 x 11.5 = 72.2566” circumference.

72.2566 / 64T = 1.12901” spacing between each mark. Yikes! Is there a low-tech way
of doing that? Yes.

37
Set a compass for a little over 1.125” on a ruler, and then start “walking” the calipers
around the circle. At the end, if you guessed correctly, the compass point will stop
exactly on the starting line…but probably not. If your guess was too wide, narrow the
compass a wee bit and re-walk the circle. If too narrow, widen the compass a bit and re-
walk the circle. Do this until you get the exact division you need for your circle, mark
them, and then drill all 64 of those marks at the drill press with a 1/16” drill bit.

You can now make a 64 tooth wheel pattern of any size, up to 23” in diameter, by
placing a piece of paper with the calculated PD drawn upon it, at the center of your
indexing board. Tape the paper down so that it doesn’t move.

Insert a 1/16” pin at the center of your indexing board, and through the paper that will
become your pattern. Place an arm over this pin so that the arm can rotate around this
center.

Then attach the pattern of the tooth form to the arm, by aligning the tooth form at the PD
drawn on the paper that is to become your wheel pattern. Put another 1/16” pin in one
of the 64 outer holes, rotate the arm snug against it, trace around the tooth form, and
then move the pin over one hole, snug the arm against it, trace around the tooth form,
and continue this until the wheel is completed. Your paper pattern for the 64T center
wheel is now ready to apply to the proper sized stock. But first, make a copy of it!!!
Because, with this method, once the pattern is gone, it’s gone (listen to the voice of
experience).

Any size wheel, with any number of teeth can be created in this primitive fashion. I
created all my early clocks using this method, including a giant two wheel clock that had
one wheel with a three foot diameter. For that large wheel I used the same procedure
described above, but instead of using an indexing board I drilled a center hole in the
concrete, and drew the large divided circle on my shop floor. It’s a good method to know
for extra large diameter wheels…or if your power goes out, but it also makes one very
thankful that there are CAD programs available. Personally, I’ll wait for the power to
come back on.

38
Drawing a Pinion
The steps for drawing a pinion are shown in the diagram below. Begin by drawing the
PD for the pinion (remember we discussed how to calculate the pinion’s PD back on
page 27?). Center a circle on the PD that is one half the (w) used to calculate the wheel
set, minus 0.03”. For example; the (w) we used to calculate our center wheel was 0.36”,

(0.36”/2) – 0.03” = 0.15”

The diameter of the circle centered on the PD is 0.15”. That is also the same width as
the teeth, at the PD, on this pinion’s matching wheel. In other words, the pinion tooth
diameter and the width of the wheel’s tooth at the PD are the same for each wheel set.

Draw a line from each side of the small circle to the center of what will become your
pinion. This gives the basic shape to the sides of the pinion’s tooth.

In the third drawing we have removed some of the lines so that we can form the
dedendum.

In the fourth drawing we have rotated the newly formed tooth by the correct number of
degrees needed for the number of teeth we want on our pinion. Here we are making an
eight toothed pinion, so we have rotated our tooth 45 degrees (360/8 = 45). The
dedendum connector line is drawn. Here I have used a flowing curve to connect the
rotated teeth.

Leaving the dedendum connector in place, remove the second tooth, as shown in the
fifth drawing. That way we can grab and rotate the tooth and its dedendum connector
the correct number of times to make our completed pinion.

39
To draw this pinion by hand, the steps are almost the same except that the pinion would
be laid out on a pattern that had the angled lines drawn using a protractor, as shown
below.

Back on page 20 I showed a side view of a roller trundle pinion. There are two basic
types of pinions; the solid pinion type that I show how to draw above, and a second type
called a ‘lantern pinion’.

A lantern pinion uses rods to interact with its wheel instead of the wooden teeth of the
solid pinion. Lantern pinions result in a lower internal friction than regular solid pinions
and are thus well adapted for use on low tooth count pinions, and when we add a tube
sleeve to the rods of a lantern pinion we have a roller trundle pinion that will allow our
pinion an even lower internal friction.

We can use the above solid pinion example to demonstrate, in the drawings below, how
to create a lantern pinion. Starting with the third drawing from the sequence above, we
can take a drill approximately the size, or smaller, of the wT circles we have placed
around the PD and drill them for the trundle rods.

To fit the next smaller sized rod, we will use a 1/8” drill to make the holes for the
trundles. In the third drawing in the sequence below, you can see that we also expand
the circumference of our pattern so that the trundle rods will have a strong wood base.

After cutting the correct number of trundle rods, we press fit the rods into their respective
trundle caps and run the arbor through the center of the lantern pinion.

If you want to create roller trundle lantern pinions you can simply cut tubes that will fit
over each of the trundle rods and spin freely upon them. The case shown in the
drawings below would be perfect for roller trundles. A 5/32 tube could easily be
fashioned to slip over each of the trundle rods, and the tube’s diameter would still be

40
within the wT we have to work with. However, that is a calculation that must be
considered before you make your lantern pinion into a roller trundle. Going too far
beyond the calculated wT diameter may cause the roller to bind within the wheel’s tooth
space. The drawing below shows how to create the roller trundle option with, in this
case, a 5/32 tube.

Drawing the Escape Wheel

The last wheel in our going train that we need to describe is the escape wheel. The
escape wheel is the most exacting, most sensitive and most important wheel in the
entire train. If you are ever having problems getting your clock to run, always start at the
escape end and troubleshoot backwards through the train.

Below I will describe one way, out of many, to create your escape wheel. However, you
may change the angles of the teeth and shape your escape wheel any way you’d like.
To work correctly, your escape wheel really only needs pointy things sticking out at
regular intervals. Feel free to change the tooth shape to suit your sculpture.

The escape wheel is matched with a set of pallets that first catch, and then release one
tooth, and then the other pallet face will catch another tooth and then release it just in
time for the first pallet face to catch the next tooth, and so on. The pallets, in this
fashion, keep the going train from ‘running free’, and when they are working properly, the
pallets job is to let the drive weight down at a slow, regular rate.

41
An impulse (gentle push) is given to the pallets by the escape wheel as it unlocks from
the escape wheel tooth. This impulse is transmitted to the pendulum and is what keeps
the pendulum swinging and the clock running.

The escape wheel will necessarily need to be about the same size, or usually smaller
than the third wheel so that the teeth of the escape wheel will easily clear the third wheel
arbor. The third wheel in our above example has an OD of 7.11”, so we can make our
escape wheel any visually desirable diameter that is less than that. Let’s create an
escape wheel that is 5” in diameter and has the conventional 30 teeth.

Draw a five inch circle, and from its center draw a vertical line straight up to the
circumference (line A). Extend this line a few inches beyond the circle. We will be using
this vertical line also to find the pivot point of our pallets.

Next, from where that vertical line A meets the circumference of the 5” circle, draw a line
perpendicular and to the left about 1/32”. That will give the tip of our first tooth some
substance.

Draw another line parallel to, and .25” to the left of line A.

Using the same center as the 5” circle, draw a 2.5” diameter circle inside the 5” diameter
circle. Remove the part of line A that runs from the center of the circle up to the
circumference of the 2.5” diameter circle.

Draw a line from the left side of the 1/32” line and down to where the line .25” away from
line A meets the circumference of the 2.5” circle, and then erase the 2.5” diameter circle.

42
Your escape tooth drawing should look like this…

You now have one of the 30 teeth required for the escape wheel. Grab that tooth and
copy and rotate it by 12 degrees another 29 times to complete your wheel. (360/30 = 12
degrees)

43
The sharp angle where the escape teeth meet at the bottom can be left as is, or
rounded. You can also change the angle of the escape tooth form itself to a shape that
is pleasing to you, as shown in the right escape wheel drawing below.

Drawing the Pallets

Now it is time to create the matching pallets for that 5” escape wheel. The first thing we
have to decide is how many escape teeth our pallets will span, and then we add 0.5
teeth to that number for pallet clearance. Usually the pallets would span somewhere
between three and nine teeth.

We will make our pallets span five teeth, but to get the pallets to work correctly, we
actually need to span (n)+ 0.5 teeth, so for our calculations our pallet span will be 5.5
teeth.

Each tooth on our 30T escape wheel is 12 degrees, so that makes the total span of our
pallets 5.5 x 12 = 66 degrees.

We need to split that 66 degrees evenly so that half the pallet span (33 degrees) is on
each side of the center Line A. That means we will need to draw our first angled line up

44
from the center of the circle to the circumference of the 5” circle at an angle of 57
degrees.

We get 57 degrees from dividing 66 degrees in half and subtracting that from the
vertical, 90 degrees.

66 / 2 = 33 and 90 – 33 = 57.

We also need to draw our second angled line from the center up to the circumference
that is 33 degrees beyond the 90 degree vertical line, or 123 degrees.

From the point were the 57 degree line meets the circle, draw a perpendicular line,
tangent to the circle, up to the vertical extension of line A. Do the same for the 123
degree line, and where they meet on line A is the pivot point for your pallets, giving you
the exact spacing required between the escape wheel and its pallets (in this case 2.98”).

You can use this same procedure for any tooth span you would like your pallets to have.
For example, a 7.5 tooth span would have angles coming up from the center of the 5”
circle at 45 degrees and at 135 degrees. If you draw this configuration, you will notice
that your pallet pivot point is much further away from the center of the escape wheel. I
will continue to show both the 5.5 and 7.5 tooth span for comparison. See the example
below.

45
Okay, now that we have the pivot point for our pallets, we need to draw the pallet faces
that will interact with the escape wheel teeth.

The two pallet faces and the pallet pivot point are the only truly important parts of the
pallets. The rest of the pallets that connect these parts can be drawn in any fashion that
you like.

To create our pallet faces, we will need to grab and rotate the 57 degree line and the
123 degree line each by +3 and -3 degrees. Extend each of these six lines past the
circumference of the 5” circle about an inch.

Now also take the two tangent lines that show where the pallet center is located and
using the pallet center, rotate both of those lines, also by + and –3 degrees.

46
These 12 lines, connected as shown in the drawing above, will give us the faces for the
entrance and exit pallets. Draw the entrance pallet face horizontally and the exit pallet
face vertically.

I included the 7.5 span to demonstrate the angle change of the final pallet faces. Notice
that both the 5.5 and the 7.5 entrance pallets are essentially horizontal, but the exit pallet
angles are quite different. The 7.5 exit pallet is almost perfectly vertical whereas the 5.5
exit pallet leans beyond 90*.

The entrance pallet is the pallet face on the left side of our 5” circle, and the exit pallet is
on the right.

If you would like, you can continue to complete the 7.5 tooth span pallets in the same
manner. A 7.5 tooth span really does make a nice set of pallets, however, we will be
completing only the 5.5 tooth span pallets below.

Now here is the tricky part. Go back to the 57 degree and 123 degree lines, copy and
rotate them +1 degree (that is 1 degree counter clockwise). The entrance and exit pallet
face lines need to be shortened back to these 1 degree lines. Shortening these pallet
face lines allows our pallets the 1 degree clearance it needs to drop into place between
the escape wheels teeth.

47
Connect these pallet faces and the pallet’s pivot point with any design that has a shape
that is pleasing to you.

Remove all the extra lines and you have your pallets.

48
The sequence above shows the action of the escape wheel upon the pallets. The
escape wheel is turning in a clockwise direction. Also shown is the movement of the
pendulum at each step. Here I have marked a tooth as it is about to meet the entrance
pallet. The pendulum is being impulsed in the third and sixth drawings.

In the first drawing the pendulum still has momentum from the exit pallet, on the right,
having been pushed by the escape wheel tooth. A drawing of what has just happened to
the exit pallet to get this impulse is shown in the sixth example.

In the second drawing the entrance pallet (on the left) has just been hit by the marked
tooth. “Tick”. The pallets and pendulum continue to move in a counter clockwise
direction around the pallet pivot for a degree or two while in contact with the marked
tooth. The momentum of the pendulum then slows, stops and reverses, and allows the
entrance pallet to be impulsed by the marked tooth as it passed under the pallet’s face,
as shown in the third drawing.

This puts the exit pallet, on the right, in the way of another tooth, shown in drawing four.
The escape tooth stops against the inside of the pallet’s arm and creates the “Tock”.
The pallets and pendulum still have momentum from the just impulsed entrance pallet,
and continue to swing to the left a degree or two. This is shown in drawing five.

49
The pendulum then slows, stops and reverses itself and that exposes the face of the exit
pallet to the tooth of the escape wheel (sixth drawing), which imparts an impulse and
swings the pendulum further to the right, where it eventually slows, stops, and reverses
itself returning us back to the first drawing.

The Dial Train and its Hour Hand

We now have all the wheels and parts of our going train. With the calculations we have
done, we have now succeeded in creating a theoretical mechanism that will allow our
minute hand to rotate once per hour.

Next it is customary to add an hour hand to the mechanism, and to do that we need to
calculate the wheels for the dial train. The dial train generally runs off of the center
wheel arbor and the dial train’s job is to turn the hour hand.

Since the hour hand moves only 1/12th as fast as the minute hand, we need a 12:1
reduction of the speed of the center wheel arbor, and that set of reducing wheels, also
needs to cause the hour hand to also move in the conventional clockwise direction.

Usually you will be able to easily identify the dial train as that set of smaller wheels on
the front of most of these wooden clocks.

Mounted to the center arbor is a pinion that is called the ‘cannon pinion’. On most
wooden clocks the cannon is firmly attached to the center arbor, and the minute and
hour hands are set independently by slippage between the hands and their arbor or
tube.

Some wooden clocks are designed to allow for synchronous movement of the hands.
That is, both hands move together synchronously when setting the time. For this
synchronous action to occur, the cannon needs to be able to slip just a little on the
center arbor, but still hold tight enough so that the hands don’t both slip and end up at
the six o’clock position. In the past, this was accomplished with the use of either springs
or rubber “O” rings – neither of which I found very satisfactory.

My contribution to the wooden clock making world is the leather plug system for
synchronous adjustment of the hands. A hole is drilled in the side of the cannon pinion

50
that will allow for an adjustable setscrew to be screwed into it. Before the setscrew is set
in place, a small leather plug is dropped into the hole in the cannon pinion. The leather
plug allows for a tight fit onto the center arbor, but also allows for a slight amount of slip
when the hands are to be set, and allows for synchronous movement of both the minute
and hour hands. The leather plug also keeps the setscrew from marring or denting the
arbor.

My clocks use a leather plug that is made by chucking a 5/32” brass tube in the drill
press and drilling through an old leather shoe or belt. This creates a leather plug that is
about 1/8” tall and 1/8” in diameter. These plugs fit nicely into a 9/64 drill hole in the
cannon. The setscrew is a #8-32 Allen Screw that is about 1/8” to 5/16” in length –
depending upon the depth of the cannon. We want the screw short enough so it does
not sit proud into the dedendum of the cannon, but long enough to have enough “bite” in
the wood. We don’t want the teeth of the intermediate wheel to hit the setscrew.

John Hilgenberg comments that “for the leather plugs I’ve been just nipping off a morsel
from an LL Bean rawhide shoelace, but I like your method better when suitable scrap
leather is at hand.” In the dial train the cannon pinion pushes an intermediate wheel to
which is tightly affixed a pinion that in turn then pushes the hour wheel. This extra
intermediate wheel not only helps create the 12:1 gear reduction but also gets the hour
hand moving in the correct
direction.

51
The hour wheel is mounted onto the hour tube that slips over the minute arbor tube and
turns easily upon it. At the opposite end of the hour tube from the hour wheel is placed
the hour hand. The hour tube assembly is set onto the minute arbor tube and is pushed
up close to, but not impeding the cannon. The intermediate wheel and its attached
pinion are then meshed with both the cannon and the hour wheel. The minute hand is
then placed on the minute arbor tube, to complete the dial train.

52
Here are a couple of pictures, front and side view, of the completed assembly that will be
slipped onto the center arbor and aligned with the intermediate wheel. The assembly is
held to the center arbor simply by the pressure of the leather plug being gently tightened
against it. These hands were taken off of my Simplicity Variant. Notice the location of
the off-set hole in the cannon pinion for the leather plug.

With this system one can synchronously adjust the minute and hour hands by simply
moving the intermediate wheel. Set both hands straight up at the 12:00 position, and
then you don’t need to touch them again. From that point on you can adjust the hands
to the correct time by moving the intermediate wheel.

A more primitive, but easier dial train to build simply press fits the minute hand onto the
center arbor and the hour hand onto an hour tube that rides upon the center arbor. But
with this simple system, the hands must be reset independently. The cannon is fast to
the center arbor and no leather plug, spring, or “O” ring is used in this simple system.
Many old (and new!) wooden clocks have this primitive dial train design.

Creating the Dial Train

To get the required 12:1 reduction, we will make two sets of wheels for our dial train; the
cannon pinion and its mate, the intermediate wheel, and then the hour wheel and its
pinion – which is the pinion that will be affixed to the front of the intermediate wheel
eventually. Because of this, it is obvious that both sets of dial train wheels need to have
the same center distance – unless you want to mount your hour hand somewhere else
besides in the center of your clock, which is just fine, and I will include an example later.

53
Some designs call for having the minute hand and hour hand separated, but here we’ll
make ours in the conventional manner – both hands concentric to the center wheel
arbor.

We could use the same (w) as we used for all of the going train wheel sets, but that
would give us a smaller cannon than I would like to have. Since I’ll be putting a leather
plug and setscrew into it, I would like the cannon to be a little bit ‘beefier’. You can do
the math, but a 0.36w only leaves me a cannon with a 1.15”PD. If you take away the
space for the dedendum, there’s not much left for the leather plug and setscrew.

Instead, I will use a 3” center and demonstrate how to do the calculations backwards on
both of our dial train wheel sets.

To get the required 12:1 reduction we need two wheel sets, so when their ratios are
multiplied together, gives us a total of 12:1. Some examples would be 1 x 12, 2 x 6, and
3 x 4. Maybe someone has used the first ratio, but I’ve never seen it. Some clocks use
the 2 x 6, but we’ll go with the most commonly used 3 x 4 = 12 example.

One set that would fit those ratios would be 30/10 and 32/8. There are many, many
more, however, that you can choose from. I will use the 10 as my cannon and the 30
will then be my intermediate wheel, and then the 32 will be my hour wheel, and the 8 will
be the pinion that is glued to the front of the Intermediate wheel.

Since we know the number of teeth, and we know our center distance, we need to first
find the PD, and then solve for the (w).

With our centers for the dial train being 3”, that means the total PD for the cannon and
the intermediate wheel would be 6” (to clarify this; remember in our calculations before
to find the centers we divided the PD by 2? Here we are simply reversing that process.
Since we know the centers between our pinion and wheel is 3”, we just multiply that by 2
to get our PD), and adding the total number of teeth for the cannon/intermediate wheel
set (10+30) we get 40. Now we can solve for (w) by putting these bits of information into
our PD equation. With that we get...

6”PD = 40T x (w) / pi = (w) = 0.47 which is a pretty big tooth and space. Each will be
almost ¼” across.

54
Once we have the (w), we substitute back in the tooth count for each the cannon and
then the intermediate wheel to get each of those individual PDs.

PD = 10T x 0.47 / 3.1416 = 1.496” or round up to 1.5” PD for the 10T cannon pinion

And then we can also find the cannon’s OD = 1.5”PD/.8333 = 1.8”

For the 30T intermediate wheel the numbers are PD = 4.5” and OD = 4.8”

Doing the same for the hour wheel set of 32T hour wheel, and 8T pinion, gives us the
same equation for (w) as above because the wheels and pinions of both of these sets
have the same number of teeth (40), however the (w) will not be the same with other
ratios that you may choose where the tooth counts are different between the sets. It just
happens that in the case we have chosen here both wheel sets total 40 teeth.

6” = 40T x (w) / 3.1416 gives us the same (w) as above = 0.47. Using 0.47 for (w) we
get an

8T PD = 1.2” and OD = 1.5”

32T hour wheel PD = 4.8” and OD = 5.1”

Applying the patterns

Since we are making full size patterns of all our parts it will be easy to just print the
pattern on regular printer paper, cut out the pattern shape, spray the back of the pattern
with a spray adhesive such as Craft Bond, and apply the pattern to the appropriately
sized stock.

The paper patterns remove easily with mineral spirits. I mark the back of all the pieces
that I’ve cut out with a “B”, for ‘back’. That’s a step that’s probably not necessary in most
cases, but for things like pallets and escape wheels, it is imperative. I like to mark all the
backs so that I can be sure all the ‘fronts’ are facing the same direction. This is just a
personal preference of mine. Adrian adds that this is “a good practice as sometimes the
back “cut” isn’t as neat as the front, and you can choose the best board face to be the
front also.”

55
With all the backs marked, I place all the pieces face down in a shallow pan to which I’ve
added a thin layer of mineral spirits…at least that’s how I do it in my dreams. So far I
haven’t actually gotten the shallow soaking pan. I simply splash a little mineral spirits on
my concrete shop floor and turn all the cut pieces paper face down in the puddle. Hey, it
dries eventually…and someday I’ll get a real pan, but then I know I’d probably just be
spilling it all the time – like I do with the little water tin I use to keep my arbors cool while
I’m polishing them.

Anyway, once the paper pattern has soaked a bit in the mineral spirits, it slides off easily,
and a little extra mineral spirits from the puddle soaked onto a rag, easily wipes off the
rest of the adhesive. I then set the pieces aside to dry before attempting to glue them
together.

Wheels from Solid Wood or Ply?

The clock’s wheels can be made from many varied materials. I have seen clock wheels
made MDF, solid wood, ply of every quality, metals such as aluminum and brass, acrylic
and other plastics, electronic circuit board material, even CD’s and Corian. One lady
even wanted to make her clock a garden accessory and wondered if it could be made
from concrete. I can’t see why not! But she never wrote me back, so I don’t know if her
experiment worked.

I recommend we make our wheels out of any good quality plywood, because ply is much
more stable against changes in temperature and humidity - and there are just so many
good quality plys available. In my plans I usually recommend Baltic birch ply because it
is available worldwide, but there are many other very good plys that work as well. There
is Finnish ply, Russian ply, apple ply used in cabinetry, and marine ply. Any good ply
works well…but just to show how forgiving these clocks really are, one day I decided to
make a clock from the old, rotten, termite infested, moldy plywood of a fallen down
chicken coop. The clock worked, but looked awful! So if you don’t want your clock to
look awful, it’s probably best to use some other material than what has been laying
around an old barnyard, but just about any ply you choose will work.

56
I get a lot of questions about ply from builders in metric countries because I list the Baltic
birch ply as ½”, or ¼”, and the builder wonders if they will have to compensate for the
metric difference. Well, here the joke is on the Americans. Did you notice the first word
in “Baltic birch ply”? The Balkans are a metric country. Their ply is already metric.
Fortunately, the measure is so close as to make no difference at all. ½” Imperial is
approximately 12mm and ¼” is close enough to 6mm, etc. You’ll also now notice that
the other two ply I mention above, Russian and Finnish are from metric countries, too.

Solid wood wheels can be made to work well also, but remember to keep your solid
wood wheels pretty small. Large solid wood wheels tend to wobble and wiggle quite a
bit more than you might like to see.

But here’s the good news, wobbles and wiggles in your wheels will not impair the
function of your clock! Not if you depth them properly. The answer to a question I
frequently get is, yes, you can use that warped piece of plywood for your wheels. And it
almost doesn’t matter how badly the piece is warped, if you don’t mind your clock’s
wheels weaving and wobbling, I don’t either.

Your clock will be very tolerant of front to back wiggle and wobble, but not up and down
wobble as occurs if the center of the wheel or pinion is not drilled dead center, or wheels
that are made elliptical because of badly reproduced copies from some copy machines.
Up and down, elliptical wobble changes the relative PD, and unless both the wheel and
pinion are designed to accommodate that PD change – as in my Weird Gears – your
wheel sets will not operate properly.

That up and down wobble is why drilling the center hole in your wheel or pinion is so
critical. I highly recommend Brad point bits for drilling your wood wheels, pinions and
frame holes. Brad point bits are an extremely accurate way of drilling these holes
because of the central point that easily aligns with the spot that needs to be drilled in the
wood.

To improve the alignment of the Brad point bit with the hole to be drilled, I always take a
sharp awl and press the point into the exact center of each hole to be drilled. This
allows the drill bit to align more accurately with the stock.

57
No matter what kind of drill bit you use, drilling slowly and backing out frequently to
eliminate the wood collected in the bit’s flutes, will help keep the bit from wandering
inside the wood and following grain.

Arbors
Solid wood clocks could be made using wooden arbors, which, if smoothed and polished
enough could be made to run with a minimal amount of extra internal friction – especially
if a dry lubricant such as graphite, or even paraffin were used - however, I prefer to
minimize the internal frictions even more, and simplify construction by using premade
metal arbors of either brass or stainless steel.

The metal arbors of various diameters are available at most hobby shops, hardware
stores, RC (radio controlled) shops, and online through sites such as
www.smallparts.com www.towerhobbies and www.hobbylobby.com

Even with the metal arbors it is a good idea to polish the arbors where they will run in
their arbor holes in the frame or plates. To polish these arbor ends, simply chuck the
metal arbor in your drill press and with a folded leather strap to which has been applied
polishing grit (available at any hardware store), turn on the drill press and grab the end
of the spinning arbor in the folded leather strap until it is smooth and polished. This
method does create a hot metal arbor, so handling them with gloves would be
recommended.

Do not try to polish arbors at the buffing wheel. This technique will lead to distorted,
misshaped arbors that may create even more internal friction than if you had not
polished them at all.

I find cutting the metal parts goes much quicker using a Dremmel tool with the metal cut-
off wheel attachment rather than a hack saw. But however you cut the pieces, be sure
that all of the burrs are removed and the ends sanded smooth. Polishing the arbors
helps decrease the friction throughout your clock dramatically.

I use Dico Premium Buffing Compound E5 – Emery that is available at most hardware
stores. Again, I spread this compound inside a folded leather strap and then squeeze
the leather strap around the arbor that is spinning in the drill press until is shines. Using
a buffing compound is an optional process; the same result can be had by just

58
squeezing the arbor between two pieces of wood until the arbor is polished. Caution:
both of these methods leave the arbor HOT!

Sizes of arbors should also depend upon their function. Heavy weights hanging from
tiny 1/8” arbors might be problematic. 3/16”, or better yet ¼” arbors at the weight end
will give us a better, more stable arbor. Also because of the amount of torque put on the
next arbor up - usually the center wheel arbor - a 3/16” diameter rod here will help keep
the deflection of the arbor to a minimum.

Arbors further up in the train, such as the arbors of the escape wheel and pallets, can
easily be made of 1/8” or 3/32” metal rods. The third wheel arbor could be made from
either 1/8” or 3/16” diameter rods, depending upon the amount of drive weight required
for your train. For example, if you wanted to make a clock that ran for eight days, it
would probably require a high ratio wind wheel and a weight pulley. The weight required
could be quite high and the amount of torque transmitted from the wind wheel to the
center wheel to the third wheel could still be quite high also. In that case a larger
diameter third wheel arbor might be chosen.

Front to Back Alignment of the Wheels

How should the wheels be laid out front to back? When looking at the side view of a
clock’s wheels, we want the wheels arranged so that they do not hit each other, the
frame, another arbor, or any other part of the clock. In other words, we want our wheels
to be able to turn freely and unencumbered.

An easy arrangement of the wheels is called the “waterfall” in which the clock wheels
are simply stacked one in front of the other, going from the great wheel to the center
wheel, third wheel, and escape, where each wheel on the next arbor up is spaced an
appropriate distance in front of the previous wheel below it. Below is a picture of a
simple clock with a ‘reverse’ waterfall arrangement of the wheels.

I called this design a ‘reverse’ waterfall because you will notice that in this arrangement
the drive weight is coming off of essentially the front of the clock. Usually we like to have
the weight as far back in our clock as possible, because usually, the further forward the
weight is hung, the more torque there is placed upon the frame. In the design below, the

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shelf built below the clock, offers a high degree of stability to the frame, and prevents
any possibility of the frame sagging.

Above is a photograph of an actual reverse waterfall design clock that I built from all of
the wheels that we discussed and designed previously in this book.

In the above clock you will also notice the addition of a seconds hand from an extension
of the escape arbor. A dial ring would be an easy addition to this frame for both the hour
and minute hands as well as one for the seconds hand.

The frame and base shelf are made of ½” Baltic birch ply and the frame has an internal
cut out created to accept the correct orientation of each of the wheels in a waterfall
pattern. The back of the frame also has a cut out for the pendulum that then passes
through the shelf below. This is an extremely simple clockworks to build, and the
addition of the shelf below the frame makes it exceedingly stable.

Other possible front to back arrangements of the wheels are possible, we simply need to
keep in mind that each wheel needs its own space away from any other part of the clock.

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Keeping the wheels accurately spaced
The wheel and pinion sets need to be aligned not only so their PD’s match, but also front
to back in the frame so that they work correctly together. To maintain the proper
spacing, front to back, we first press fit the wheel onto the arbor in the correct
placement, and then use spacers on the arbors to keep the wheel aligned with its pinion.

Spacers can be made from solid wood that has been center drilled, or we can use tubes
cut to the correct length, and that fit over our arbors as spacers.

With your wheel aligned between the frames, and your spacers in place, you should be
able to move your wheel front to back about 1/16”. This gives the arbor plenty of room
to move freely and without binding against the frame members.

Wheel Cut Outs

Below are some of my favorite, classic wheel cut outs, but these are only a few of the
possible variations. The variations and styles of wheel cut outs are only limited by your
imagination.

Wheel cut outs do lighten the mass of our wheels, but as we saw in the inertia equation,
a small amount of change in mass is pretty insignificant. We create wheel cut outs
primarily so that our mechanisms will have an overall pleasing appearance.

Our wheels would run fine without cut outs. The original wood wheel clocks generally
did not use wheel cut outs. As I mentioned, the original wooden clockworks were made
with small wood wheels so as to compete in size with their European counterparts.

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Those wheels were also hidden away inside a case to hide the stigma of having wood
for wheels instead of metal.

It wasn’t until we brought these large wheeled clocks out of the closet and skeletonized
their frames to show off the wheels as art, that we began to see the variation of wheel
cut out styles that we see today.

Balancing the Wheels

Once the escape wheel has been cut out, I mount it, by its center hole, to a board so that
I can freely turn the escape wheel on the board. I then mount the board to the table of
my sander and turn the escape wheel into the sander to make the escape wheel
perfectly round. Remove as little of the escape wheel’s tooth points as possible to get
your escape wheel perfectly round. Even though the escape wheel’s roundness is the
most important, all of the other wheels in the clock train can be made perfectly round
using this method as well.

Now that all of the wheels have been cut out and rounded, we will want to balance the
wheels. It is especially important to balance the escape wheel, but all the wheels should
also be balanced.

To balance the wheels, run an arbor through the center hole and give the wheel a spin.
The heaviest part of the wheel will end up at the bottom. Remove some of the wood at
that lowest point on the wheel, either by drilling from the back of the wheel, sanding the
wheel slightly thinner, or sanding away some of the extra wood left around the arms and
area around the cut-out.

Lubrication
There are two main places that internal friction takes place inside of our mechanisms.
The first is where the arbors run in their arbor holes. Lubrication is generally not
required with metal arbors on wood frame construction. My Number Six has run over
ten years without any lubrication of the arbors. However, a little paraffin in the arbor

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holes in the frame may be helpful in reducing friction, but the major way to reduce arbor
friction is to polish the ends of the arbors where they run in the frame.

The second major source of internal friction is where the teeth of the wheel and pinion
meet each other. There are lots of ways to decrease friction in this area, the best is to
use high tooth count pinions, but as we saw, that means cutting a lot more teeth on our
wheels. Other ways to decrease inter-tooth friction is to polish each contact tooth
surface with a Dremmel. That’s always been too tedious for me. Cutting at the
scrollsaw with a number 5 reverse blade and then sanding to the line at the sander has
worked fine for me. But some wheels and pinions can be obstinate – all of these
mechanisms have their own personalities. For those obstinate wheels and pinions I add
a little paraffin to their contact tooth surfaces.

An easy way to do this is to use a Crayon of the correct color match to your wheel’s
wood, then pull the pallets off your completed clock so that when you add a drive weight
the wheels of the train all spin freely. Then stick the Crayon into that area between the
spinning wheel and pinion. Some paraffin will then enter the tooth surfaces, but you
don’t want too much. A little paraffin is better than a lot because if the dedendum
becomes filled with paraffin, your clock will have increased internal friction.

Polishing the arbors and then a little paraffin in the arbor holes and on the tooth surfaces
should remove that last little bit of extra internal friction in your clock. Then when you
gently blow on the escape wheel, all of the wheels turn freely throughout the entire train.
And that’s what we want…but if that’s not what you’ve gotten, you’ll want to refer to the
section on depthing below.

Where metal tubes run on metal arbors, some lubrication will eventually be required. I
have tried vegetable oils, 3-in-1, WD-40, silicone, and graphite, and nothing works as
well as real, authentic clock oil. Timesaver’s has clock oil available online at
www.timesavers.com but don’t use any oil on the wood surfaces - not on the teeth, and
not in the arbor holes. You’ll just be asking for a nasty looking dirt and grit build-up.

I recommend only stainless steel or brass be used as arbors. I know these are
sometimes not readily available and substitutes must be found. Jeff Hecht says,
“Interesting tidbit… Where steel arbors run inside brass tube (like Toucan’s pendulum

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pivot), don’t use cheap 1/8” steel welding rod… it’s much too soft, scores, breaks down,
and causes friction over time. The piano wire from the hobby store is MUCH better”

Finish on the Teeth

Unless you are making a chicken-coop clock, most of us want our clocks to look nice
once we’ve finished them, so of course we want to put a nice finish on the wood to
protect it and show it off.

Almost any finish works fine on the frame, as long as you keep it off of any stationary
arbors that may be in place, and keep it out of the arbor holes. To this end I wrap the
stationary arbors with painter’s tape and plug all the arbor holes with toothpicks that
have been wrapped with paper towel to keep out any finish. On the other hand, some
guys like to apply finish and re-drill all the arbor holes. I don’t really recommend that
method because, as you’ll find, some finishes really never dry completely - which leads
me to a word of caution about finish on the wheels; try to avoid getting finish on the tooth
surfaces.

Unless you’d like to apply for your honorary doctor of dentistry degree after you’ve
cleaned out between each of those teeth, you might want to avoid getting finish on any
of the tooth surfaces. Finish not only takes up valuable space between the teeth, but as
I mentioned, some finishes, like polyurethane, never really dry and leave a sticky coating
that increases internal friction. How many times have I heard, “My clock ran great before
I put finish on it.”?

Of course, some finishes are better than others. For example a little lacquer overspray
between the teeth doesn’t seem to appreciably inhibit the action of these clocks. So if
you must apply finish to your wheels, a simple method that works and keeps most of the
teeth fairly free of finish is, instead of spraying directly into the wheel’s teeth, spraying
lacquer toward the center of, and over the wheel, avoiding the teeth that are closest to
you, and spraying out over the further away teeth. Going around the wheel in this way
keeps most of the lacquer off of the tooth surfaces.

An even better way was sent to me by one of my builders. Before he cut out his wheels
he applied finish to his plywood stock. After the finish had dried completely, he then

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applied blue painter’s tape to the whole area he had applied the finish to, and then on
top of the tape he applied the wheel pattern in the usual way. That way he could cut out
his wheel, cutting through the pattern applied to the painter’s tape, and then when the
wheel was completely cut out, he simply peeled off the painter’s tape leaving a perfect
finish underneath – and no finish between the teeth.

The Frame
So much of the clock’s overall appearance will come from the design of the frame. The
most common type of frame has a front and back “plate” that are spaced apart by
columns, and the clock’s wheels run in between. Most of my clocks have this type of
frame, but there are other variations you might like to try out.

For example, the uniframe has stationary arbors extending from only a single back plate
that has been mounted to the wall. The clock’s wheels turn on the arbors, instead of
having the arbors turning in the frame. The drawback to this type of frame is finding a
place to hang the dial train. My Floating Wheel and Genesis clocks are examples of this
uniframe type.

Mixed frame clocks have a front and back plate in some parts of the clock, and a
uniframe in other parts. My Simplicity is an example of this mixed frame type clock.

Whatever type of frame you construct, it must be strongly made to minimize sagging. A
sagging frame will not only bind the arbors as they run in the frame, but may also cause
the PD between the wheel and its pinion to change. Either problem, independently,
could prevent a clock from running.

For me, designing the frame for a new clockworks is the most difficult part of the whole
process. Creating the wheels, doing the math, setting up the going and dial trains,
determining the pendulum are all the easy parts. Getting all those parts to look good
together is the difficult part, so I wanted to share with you two bits of design information I
picked up from a couple of artist friends of mine.

The first tip comes from Marc Tovar, a clockster buddy of mine and genius clock
designer (check out his website http://wooden-clockworks.com/ ). What he told me

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about design was “Take a line and bend it until it is pleasing.” Simple…well, you might
think so until you apply it.

The other bit of information on improving artistic appeal came from a fabric artist friend.
I was really stuck on one frame design, and as frustrated as I could be. I mentioned my
dilemma to my friend and she said, “Clayton, you are trying too hard to draw pretty.
Draw ugly.” She saw that I was stuck on getting everything just right.

Following her instruction, I set about freely drawing ugly and didn’t worry at all about
making it pretty. On my third attempt at “ugly” I had my Nautilus – which is one of my
most beautiful designs and anything but ugly.

Just as a side note…the first two drawings truly were ugly.

Depthing
Once the frame is built, and the wheel sets are cut out, before going any further in your
build, it is best to ‘depth’ your wheel sets. Depthing will save you a lot of aggravation
later. By getting your wheel sets to operate perfectly inside of the frame you’ve built, you
can be assured that your train will work freely later when you assemble your clock.

It’s best to depth now because, maybe you didn’t drill your center holes exactly in the
center of your wheels, or your frame may have been drilled just a bit off, or some of your
teeth are too fat, or the addendum of one hits at the dedendum of the other. All of these
problems can be very frustrating to try and find in a clock that’s already completely
assembled.

This depthing procedure is used to test out wheel sets. Begin by taking the frame apart
(this is only applicable to two plate frames. Of course you wouldn’t take apart your
uniframe.), and then place a wheel on its arbor and into its proper arbor hole in the
frame. Now put the matching pinion on another arbor and put it into the frame in its
proper arbor hole. Close the frame and see if the wheel and its pinion move freely
together. To check this, I blow gently on the large wheel. It should move easily. If the
wheel set does not turn freely, determine the direction that wheel set will be turning in

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your clock, and remove some of the non-driven tooth surface, or dedendum, or
addendum as required to get the wheel set to operate freely.

When the first set is working properly, open the frame again and remove this set, then
replace it with the next wheel set. Being sure to fit each wheel set into its proper arbor
holes.

Once the depthing of each of the wheel sets in your clock has been completed, and all
the wheels and their pinions have been shown to move freely together, you can
assemble your clock with the knowledge that (most likely) your clock’s train will function
correctly. However, even with the best depthing, some ‘tweaking’ of your mechanism
may be necessary to get it running perfectly.

Laying out the Wheels

The real design component comes in laying out where you will be putting the wheels in
the frame, and what the final frame will look like. The wheels can be mounted in a
straight line vertically, like the Simplicity, or horizontally, like the Genesis, or they can be

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mixed around to give various, pleasing designs, like in the Number Six, or the Hawaiian
Time clocks.

Above are some variations we can make with the wheel sets that we calculated earlier. I
took a little liberty, however, with redesigning the dial train for the third example shown
above. I wanted to show that it is possible to have the minute and hour hands
separated. In this case the hour hand is on the left and the minute hand on the right with
the dial train’s intermediate wheel in the center.

The fourth example from the drawing above is also shown in the picture below second
on the left. On its right is the exact same configuration of wheels except that they are
now upside down. You can see how having the mechanism upside down dramatically
increases the mechanism’s overall length because the pendulum still needs to keep its
relationship with the pallets.

On the far right is a horizontal version, and for comparison, on the extreme left is the
same mechanism at a 45 degree angle.

The important thing we must remember is that the arbor distances for each wheel set
must be maintained at the values calculated so that the PD’s of each separate wheel
and pinion set are always exactly in contact.

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Another technique I use to get the wheels positioned in a pleasing arrangement is to
quickly cut from cardboard all of the wheels, and also make cardboard strips that are the
length of each of the distances between each wheel set. I call these “Exact Centers”
strips. You may have seen “Exact Centers” in the plans for some of my designs.

I connect all of those exact centers strips together by sticking a pin through the centers
of where the wheels would be. I can then also apply the wheels to the pins and move
the wheels around to any pleasing position that the cardboard, exact centers strips
allow.

If you decide to build your clock from the simple three wheel design using a doubling
weight pulley, your weight cord will necessarily need to come off of the right side of the
wind pulley. This will make the center wheel turn in the correct, clockwise, direction.

If you decide to use a wind or great wheel, the drive weight will usually need to come off
of the left side of the wind pulley, as shown in the two drawings above. This will drive
the wind wheel in a counter-clockwise direction that will then turn the center wheel arbor
in the correct, clockwise, direction. I have simplified the above drawings by showing a
straight weight drop. Actually, each would require a weight pulley to double the run time
to give a full 30 hours on a wind. Examples of those run-time-extending weight pulleys
are shown in the next section.

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Rewinding Systems
We could build a clock that runs great for a day, but how do we go about rewinding it so
that it will run again another day? We need a system to rewind the clock, and there are
many variations, but basically two common rewind systems; key rewind, and weight-
counter-weight rewind. You can see examples of both on my Simplicity page. The
Original (blond wood) Simplicity has the weight, counter-weight rewind system with
pulleys to run the full 30 hours on a wind. To rewind this system one simply pulls down
on the cord of the counterweight side while gently lifting the weight side, and the one-
way ratchet at the wind pulley allows the clock to rewind itself around the wind pulley
enough to run again for another day.

The weight/counter weight system uses a double wind pulley. One side of this double
wind pulley is for the weight cord, and the other side of the weight pulley is for the
counterweight cord to wind and unwind onto. That means that to have that wrapping,
unwrapping of the wind pulley taking place as the clock is running and later, then being
rewound, one of the sides of the wind pulley must already have a days worth of winding
put onto it as shown in the drawing below.

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The Simplicity Variant (dark wood picture on my website) uses a key to rewind its weight
back up to the top. This type of key rewind requires another two extra gears (they are
not called wheels this time) to be made. One gear has a rod affixed to its center that the
gear rotates upon. The rod’s end also fits the opening of the key. As the key turns that
gear’s central rod, that gear turns yet another gear that is glued onto the wind pulley,
and the one-way ratchet system allows the weight to be drawn back up to the top.

Notice also in the drawing below that I stayed with the conventional “gear” shaped teeth
for the rewind gears, and made the center wheel and cannon teeth smoothly undulating.
It’s okay to mix tooth forms.

Unlike the double wind pulley used in the weight/counterweight rewind system, this key
type of rewind system uses only a single wind pulley barrel because there is no
counterweight cord involved.

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Remember how we needed two extra gears for our key rewind system? Well,
constructing a key rewind system is an even simpler task if it is associated with a clock
train that has a wind or great wheel. In this case the wind arbor is in some way made to
fit the key, just as before, and then, unlike the example above, the wind arbor also has
the wind pulley firmly attached to it.

Unlike the last example, this time the wind arbor turns freely inside of the wind wheel.
To turn the wind wheel in the correct direction, the wind pulley and wind wheel are
connected through a one way ratchet in the same way as in the examples above. In this
key-wound wind wheel example, when the key is placed on the arbor and turned
clockwise, the weight cord winds onto the pulley and the weight is lifted upwards.

It is important to consider that whichever rewind system that you may choose, it is
imperative that you always stop the pendulum when rewinding your clock. Stopping the
pendulum will protect the precise adjustments between the pallets, escape wheel and
pendulum that you made to get your clock running perfectly during the “tweaking” stage.

Gently restart the pendulum after the clock has been rewound completely.

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That One-Way Ratchet System and the Clicks
We need to create a one-way ratchet system so that we can easily rewind our clock
each time it has run down. The simplest kind to build uses a simple click gear that is
made to turn in only one direction because some kind of detent (catch or lever) moves
into place behind the click gear’s teeth as it is turned in the free-turning direction. The
stopping detent can either be spring loaded, or gravity driven, to make sure it prevents
the click gear from reversing. That stopping detent is usually called a ‘click’; even the
completely quiet ones.

Early on, I had this brilliant idea of creating a gravity driven, quiet operating click system.
I drew up my unique design and sent it out to all my clockster buddies. I shortly got an
email back that simply said, “Take a look at this” with a link. I clicked on the link, and
there was my invention. Someone had stolen my idea! Not only that, but they had
improved upon it!

I then noticed the date of the clock. That clock had been built in the 1700’s!!!

I still can’t figure out how that old tyme clockster traveled into the future 300 years to
steal my idea!

The clicks we will be using to create our one-way system are similar to the ones I used
on my Horologium and on my Genesis. These are wonderfully safe and precise clicks.
The clicks should be safe and precise…after all, the clicks need these qualities since
they will be supporting the entire amount of drive weight used to run our clock.

I showed you another click gear previously that was being held by two clicks, here is a
slightly different one that uses three click flags.

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The clicks are built like flags. The flag pole fits into a hole drilled into the wind wheel,
and the flag is glued into the flag pole in such an orientation that the flag contacts a tooth
of the click gear and prevents the click gear from turning backwards.

You will want to be sure about the angle at which you glue your flag poles into your wind
wheel. It is easy to get the flags reversed. To prevent reversed flags and also to get the
flags set at the proper angle so that they will click firmly into the click gear, set your click
gear in place temporarily and align the flags. Don’t glue the click gear to the wheel; it is
only there right now for flag alignment purposes. You want the click on the flags to have
a little spring to them so that they will soundly “click” into place as the click gear is
rewinding.

The click gear is glued to the wind pulley, and this arrangement allows the pulley to be
rewound, and then, when the rewind key is released, the force of the drive weight is
transmitted into the click flags, and thus into the wind wheel, where the force then travels
up the going train into the pallets and eventually over to the pendulum.

The picture below shows how to string up a double wind pulley correctly. Half of the
wind cord needs to pass through the center divider of the wind pulley - which has a hole
drilled in it for this purpose. After the cord has been threaded through the center of the
wind pulley, one side of the cord is wrapped the appropriate number of times around the
correct division of the pulley. That way, as the weight unwinds, the counterweight winds
up on the opposite division of the wind pulley. When rewinding, the counterweight side
unwinds as the weight side winds back onto the pulley. Notice how the click gear is

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glued firmly to the wind pulley in this drawing. The entire drive weight of the clock is
transferred through this joint.

Since the connection between the click gear and the wind pulley is such an important
joint, we do not want it failing. I now design the click gear and wind pulley to be held
together not only with glue, but I also drill the click gear and the wind pulley and then
insert a 1/16” support pin to minimize the potential of separation of these important parts.

Hang-ups and Hook-ups, the Pendulum

So far we have chosen our seconds pendulum, made our going train, dial train, frame
and pallets. We have installed our rewind system, but our clock is still not ticking
because the pallets have nothing to impulse. Now let us first suspend our seconds
pendulum, and then attach it to the rest of the clock.

Obviously, a pendulum needs to be able to swing freely. To do that the pendulum

somehow needs to be hung on our clock. Remember the first pendulums were
suspended with a thread. That’s still possible, but there are better ways. Most factory
made pendulum clocks use a suspension spring. I didn’t want my builders to have to
purchase suspension springs, so I have gone a different route with my designs. Mostly,
my designs use something called a ‘knife edge’ pendulum mounting system. A knife
edge design prevents the wobble that would be inherent in a suspension string, and it is
of a style that can easily made at home in your shop.

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The knife edge suspension system is just as it sounds - some part of the pendulum is
shaped into something resembling the edge of a knife, and that knife edge sits in a
shallow groove cut into the pendulum mount. The pendulum mount is the part that sticks
out from the clock so that the pendulum can be mounted onto it to let the pendulum
swing freely.

Note here that the pendulum mount has a shallow groove cut into it. It’s not a deep
groove. It is only deep enough to keep the pendulum’s knife edge from slipping off the
pendulum mount. The groove needs only to be approximately 1/32” (0.5mm) in depth.
A deep groove will impede the free movement of the pendulum.

I should mention here that the pendulum mount does not have to be directly in line with
the clock, its wheels, or anything else for that matter. You can mount your pendulum
pretty much anywhere you would like and then add something to connect the pallets and
the pendulum together. A pendulum mounted in this way can be connected to the rest
of the clock with a piece of linkage called a ‘pendulum/crutch connector’.

Take a look at my Inclination, Swoopy, Bird of Paradise, and others, especially Vortex to
see how I used a pendulum/crutch connector to connect the pendulum with the rest of
the clock. The pendulum/crutch connector gives us tremendous latitude in design.

The pendulum needs, in some way, to be connected to the movement of the pallets. On
my Genesis, and on my MoonPhase clock, the pendulum comes directly off of, and is an
integral part of, the pallets. That’s not the usual way of hooking the pendulum to the
clock because it requires some weird adjustors to sync the pallets with the escape

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wheel, and the excess weight of the pendulum and bob can put torsional stress on the
pallet arbor.

The usual way a pendulum is attached to the pallets is through a ‘crutch’. A crutch is
usually an adjustable extension off of the pallet arbor. The pallets are usually fast to
their arbor, but the crutch, on the same arbor, usually has some ability to be adjusted.
The hole at the top of the crutch arm shown below is for the pallet arbor. The Allen
screw, shown entering the crutch from the side, will hold the crutch firmly to the arbor
once the crutch, pallets, pendulum and escape wheel have been brought into proper
adjustment with each other.

A pin at the bottom (or top, as seen in my Vortex and Simplicity) of the crutch passes the
impulse from the escape wheel and pallets into the pendulum. This can be
accomplished by running the crutch pin directly into the pendulum, or as I mentioned
above, by using a crutch-pendulum connector.

The crutch pin, however, cannot be a tight fit into the pendulum. There needs to be a
little ‘wiggle room’. For a crutch pin going directly into the pendulum’s shaft, you should
be able to stick the corner of a dollar bill between the crutch pin and the inside edge of
the pendulum’s hole that accepts the pin. More space than that and the impulse from
the pallets isn’t transmitted with enough force into the pendulum, and the clock may

77
stop. Less space than that and the internal friction inside the pendulum’s hole against
the crutch pin may stop the clock.

If you use a crutch-pendulum connector, the pin in the crutch and the pin in the
pendulum shaft are fixed points, and the wiggle room comes from the connector itself
which has its connecting holes drilled just ever-so-slightly oversized. Below are
examples of crutch-pendulum connectors from three of my own clock designs.

The Mysterious Bob and Its Adjustment

The bob…now this brings us right back to Galileo again, doesn’t it? There he was in
church next to his stinky friends, watching those incense globes swinging away down at
the bottom of those various lengths of cord, and here we are, over four hundred years
later, and we’re going to delve into their purpose yet again.

Actually, Galileo’s incense globes were better theoretical pendulums than the actual
pendulums we have on our clocks. A theoretical pendulum has nothing attaching its bob
to the clock. No string, no shaft, nothing, and that’s why it’s theoretical, and that’s why
the lengths given in the charts are incorrect, because they are also theoretical. Those

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lengths tell you where your bob should be if you have nothing holding it to your
clock…but you do (hopefully).

What the charts measure, actually, is where the ‘center of gravity’ of your pendulum
should be. But the actual center of gravity must also include the weight of the pendulum
shaft – that theoretically non-existent attachment of your bob to the clock. In other
words, if you don’t attach your bob to your clock in any way, the charts should be
correct…good luck.

Okay, maybe I’m not being fair. The charts do give us a starting point, and again to be
fair, how do the charts know what you are hanging your bob with? Or how would they
know your bobs mass, or its wind resistance, or if you live at sea level or on top of a
mountain, or in a gravitational vortex in some weird space-time continuum? They don’t.

My Vortex clock is named that because I didn’t know all this stuff when I was building it.
Because I had to keep making longer and longer pendulums to get my Vortex into its
proper beat, I thought I might be living in a gravitational vortex of some kind. Mark
Twain said, “Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.” Same
kind of thing applies here with pendulum length charts - except nobody dies; they just
give their clocks funny names. (Come to think of it…Twain’s comments may actually
apply to the contents of this entire book.)

As Ward Goodrich puts it, when speaking of the center of gravity in his authoritative
book, The Modern Clock, “It is simply used as a starting point in building pendulums,
because there must be a starting point…” Ha! Clear as mud, right? What he’s saying is
make your pendulums longer than the theoretical.

What is a bob anyway? It is just a weight, and with that weight we can eventually find a
center of gravity for your clock. We don’t want a really heavy bob because the train has
to push it 3600 times an hour. However, we don’t want it too light either because our
center of gravity would need to shift further away from our clock giving us an extra-long
pendulum shaft (real, not theoretical). In that case, the extra mass of the extra length of
the pendulum shaft is trying to compensate and make up for the low weight of the bob.

Fortunately, even with all the hoop-la I’ve given it, the exact bob weight really isn’t very
important, and I usually determine mine by experimentation anyway.

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Here is basically how I do it. Stick a bob on the pendulum shaft. If the clock runs too
fast, lengthen the pendulum shaft and/or make the bob heavier. If the clock runs too
slowly, reverse all that. Simple.

What we are trying to achieve for our seconds pendulum is a pendulum shaft about 42”
in overall length measured from the knife edge to the center of the bobs mass. If we
have that, we have it right…theoretically.

Bob Adjustments
Usually on the bottom of the bob there is some kind of adjustment available. Most of the
time there is a threaded rod sticking out the bottom that has a nut that is used to regulate
the clock. Lower the regulating nut and the clock runs slower. Raise the nut and it
raises the bob and the clock runs a bit faster, just as we saw with the Inclination example
above.

Below is a drawing with three bobs with three different ways to raise and lower the bob
to get the clock into proper beat. The first example uses a wedge that slips in to hold the
bob in position. There’s not a lot of fine adjustment with this type of bob, but it is still
quite functional. The second example shows a rotating dial on the bottom of the bob
that can be tightened into the exact position needed. It has both a gross adjustment by
selecting the hole in the pendulum that the dial is to fit into, and it has a fine adjustment
by rotating the small dial below the bob. In the third example there is a slider inside the
bob that attaches at the upper end to the pendulum, and at the lower end has a threaded
rod screwed into it. Adjustment of the bob up or down takes place when the adjustment
nut below the bob is turned.

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You remember how I mentioned that pendulums don’t like weather changes? Bobs
don’t like wind currents. My Simplicity will run beautifully all night and happily greet me
in the morning with her beautiful song as I enter my shop, but shortly after I open the
door next to her, her bob gets buffeted by the breezes and she comes to a silent stop.
Unlike me, bobs don’t like these warm tropical Hawaiian trade winds. If your clock’s bob
is in the path of the air currents, it won’t like it when your forced air furnace comes
on…or fans…or windows, or anything blowing on it. You might want to keep the kids
from swinging on them too.

Bob Adjusting Stuff for the Perfectionist

And since we are discussing bob adjustments, I have a neat one for you.

Did you ever wonder if there was an exact way to adjust your pendulum to exactly the
right length? There is! (And I’ll bet you thought we were through with complex
calculations!)

All it requires are three things. First, what is the length of the pendulum? We need to
know the Length or (L), and this is the hard part, because it requires the "theoretical" and
"actual" (L) to be exactly the same - and any of us that have worked with calculating

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pendulum lengths knows how much those two can differ (you will remember that’s how
Vortex got her name).

However, there is a very simple way to get these two to jibe - count the ticks. Simple as
that - count the ticks for one minute for the pendulum you want to adjust. It's best to do
this a few times to get it right, and then average them. Your count shouldn't be off by
more than a tick a minute. We will call that value (t) (the little (t) will stand for ticks per
minute, but just to warn you, there’s a big (T) coming later in the calculation).

So to find (L) from (t) we insert (t) into this formula: (L) = 140900/(t) SQUARED.

Second thing needed is to know how much the clock’s error is. So start your clock and
let it run, say, 24 hours and see how many SECONDS it is off, plus or minus. That value
is (S).

And lastly, one needs to know the pitch of the adjusting screw in inches (sorry metric
guys). The Pitch (P) is given in teeth per inch. That pitch per inch number is the 32 in the
8-32 threaded rod I usually recommend for my pendulum bob adjustment screws.

Once we know (L), (S), and (P) we can insert them into this formula to find the number of
turns necessary on the bob's adjustment nut. Turns (T) = 23 x (L) x (S) x (P)

After we carry out the multiplication, we must point off six places in our answer.
(Confused?? It will all become clear in my example below).

Here is an example for one of our seconds pendulum clocks that should beat at 60 times
a minute but is gaining (a positive error) one minute and a half per day, thus (S) will be
90 seconds.

The adjusting screw I recommend has a pitch of 32 (P = 32). The 60 ticks per minute
corresponds to a pendulum length (L) of 39.14. (i.e. (L) = 1400900/60 SQUARED =
1400900/3600 = 39.13889). We can round down to (L) = 39 because we don't need to
know the accuracy down to a tenth of a turn.

Now that we know the values for (L), (S), (P), we can calculate (T) from the above
equation.

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(T) = 23 x 39 x 90 x 32 = 2583360. At this point in the calculation is where you count
over six places and put in a point. That gives us 2.58, or about two and a half turns to
make your clock's pendulum exactly the right length.

But how do we know which direction to make the two and a half turns?

Since this clock is running fast, or gaining 90 seconds per day, one would need to
lengthen the pendulum by those two and a half turns to slow the mechanism down.

Or, then again, you could just adjust your clock’s pendulum the way we all do
anyway...using the trial and error method.

By the way, I found this information in a NAWCC Bulletin from October 1967 Volume XII,
No. 12, Whole Number 130, Pg. 1158. It wasn't even an article, but in a comment about
an article from a previous issue that was not, as the writer put it, as "complete" as it
should have been.

Striking Mechanisms
Striking mechanisms can be a real joy to add onto your clock. It’s always a thrill to hear
your clock strike on the hour, sometimes loud, like my Wee Willie, and sometimes very
softly, like my Nautilus.

There are a couple basic types of strike mechanisms; the passive strike, and the
counting strike. If you’d like to make a clock with a counting strike, I offer the Attempt in
my Masochist’s Corner. Building a counting strike into your clock mechanism is like
creating two clocks at one time. We will describe the simpler, passing strike mechanism
here.

A passing strike is a mechanism that passively raises some type of hammer each hour
to strike a gong, bell, or pretty much anything that you place in its way. For a couple of
years I had one of my clocks smacking a plastic cup each hour…and “smack” was the
actual sound it made. Each hour that ‘smack’ made me smile, too, because I could have
just as easily put a conventional bell in the hammer’s path, but I liked it because it wasn’t
conventional.

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The mechanism by which the hammer is lifted each hour can be simple, as on my
Nautilus, where the center arbor simply has a cam on it that lifts the hammer each hour,
or the hammer lifting mechanism can be more complex and run through a few other
levers, such as the two variations shown on my Mission and Wee Willie.

When first setting the hands on a clock with a strike mechanism, the clock mechanism is
first allowed to strike, and then the hands are set to the hour at that point. From then on,
if your cam has been cut correctly, each hour as the hammer is dropped, the minute
hand will be pointing directly at the 12:00 position.

When using the leather plug system for synchronously adjusting the hands, the cam
should be attached to the cannon pinion. That way, as the hands are synchronously
reset, they stay in sync with the lifting cam, which is labeled as “Snail Cam”, shown in
the drawing of a simple, passive hourly strike mechanism below. An hourly strike
mechanism is also sometimes called a ‘passing strike’ because a single strike of the bell
or gong announces the passing hour.

Notice with the snail cam type of passive hourly strike mechanism the hands can be set
normally in the clockwise direction, but that the strike arm must be lifted out of the way if
the hands are to be set in a counter clockwise direction.

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Let’s design a passive strike mechanism that works best with the leather plug system. It
is a little more involved than the simple snail cam lifting the hammer directly, but this
scheme will allow our hands to be set forward or back without us having to remember to
lift the hammer out of the way of a cam – in this case called a rocker detent - going in a
reverse direction.

Below is a passive strike from one of my clocks that will allow us to move the strike
detent clockwise and counter clockwise without jamming…or even having to remember
anything. The arrow shows the normal direction that the strike detent would be turning
when the clock is running. Notice also that you don’t have to settle for only one strike of
the bell per hour. You have the option to redesign your strike detent to strike every half
or even quarter hour – or even every five minutes…if you could stand it.

Notice in the picture above that the hammer is not in contact with the bell when at rest.
There should be about 1/16” separation between the bell and the hammer at rest. This
will allow the bell to resonate after being struck. The hammer is attached to a wire which
is flexible enough to bend slightly and come into contact with the bell when the arm is
dropped.

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Now That You Know All This…What Could Possibly
Go Wrong?
Well, for one thing, bushings. Most of the time bushings are a great big mistake, but
that’s because we tend to use the wrong kind of bushing.

My clocks run as drawn, and most don’t use bushings. They all run, and run well, but
that’s only if they are built as drawn. If I get the question “Why doesn’t my clock run?”
my first question is “Did you build it exactly according to the plan? Or did you make
some “Improvements” to the design?” Usually the answer is ‘Yes’ and usually they have
put in brass bushings. Brass bushings can be a huge mistake, because brass bushings
have no ‘wiggle room’ for the arbor running inside of them.

If there is any sag at all in their frame, a clock with bushings can’t run because it is being
squeezed inside the bushing tube. This, of course, does not apply to uniframe clocks
because a uniframe frame can’t sag. This being said, my Genesis is a uniframe clock
and I found it actually ran with lower drive weight when it was built without the use of
brass tube bushings.

If you just absolutely must put in bushings - and I’ll admit that the proper bushings
inserted in the proper way can decrease internal friction - then use some kind of plastic
bushing material, like PTFE (low friction Delryn) from U.S. Plastics Corp.
www.usplastic.com that has been inserted into your clock’s frame and then drilled to the
exact arbor hole size shown in the plans. But please don’t use brass bushings - and
why would you want to when these clocks run so well without them?

When I visited the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors Museum in
Columbia Pennsylvania, they had on display a wooden clock that was made over 300
years ago using the same metal arbor in wood frame construction we will use here to
build our clock, and their 300 year old clock is still in working order today. So if you’d
like your clock to run for a couple hundred years, you might consider keeping those
brass bushings out of your clock.

Pretty much the same holds true for bearings. The word itself tells you where in the train
bearings should be used – bearings should be used where they have to bear weight.
Okay, if you must, put them in the lowest end of your train so that they can bear the

86
pressures of the drive weight, but if you put them in at the escape end, bearings will
actually increase internal friction and you will need even more drive weight to keep your
clock running. If you do decide to use bearings at the wind wheel arbor, John
Hilgenberg recommends, “When you use arbor bearings, be sure to allow them to float
in their cavities enough to find the right alignment. I use slightly oversize cavities with a
sliding or pivoting retainer to keep them there.”

Besides brass bushings, finish on the teeth and sagging frames, what else could go
wrong? Only about six million things, but I’ve found that the amount of frustration
suffered, and then surmounted, is proportional to the sense of accomplishment one feels
when they hear their clock finally singing its beautiful song. There is nothing like the
pride one feels when finally any new clock design begins ticking…or the BTU’s it
produces when it doesn’t.

The 8-Day Clock

Now that we have created a simple clockworks that will run a full day on a wind, the next
step is to create a clock that runs a full week on a wind. There are many ways to create
an 8-day clockworks and we will discuss a few of them here. One would think that the
easiest way would simply be to put a larger ratio wind wheel at the bottom of our simple
30 hour clockworks mechanism. Personally, I have not had much success with this
approach. I think it could be accomplished if the wind wheel arbor was, 1) well
supported, and 2) run on bearings, because about eight times the drive weight required
for our 30 hour clock would necessarily be loaded onto this poor, unsuspecting 8-day
mechanism. However, the bearings themselves might help eliminate a small bit of that
drive weight.

How big would our wind wheel need to be? What ratio would we need to have to
accomplish an 8-day run time by adding it to our simple clockworks? We need a
minimum of a 2:1 ratio for our simple 30 hour clock to run for a day. If we want it to run 8
days, we need a 2 x 8 = 16:1 ratio wind wheel set.

You can do the calculations, but if we only used a lowly 12 tooth pinion, in this case we
would need to have a 192 toothed wind wheel to give us the required 16:1 ratio. That

87
could be a pretty big, ugly wind wheel…at least if it were to be made of wood, because
we would need some hefty teeth to be able to support all that drive weight. However, if
you are making your 16:1 wind wheel out of brass, have at it!

Because we don’t really want such a large wind wheel pushing our going train, another
option would be to add a weight pulley. Now we only need an 8:1 ratio wind wheel with
96 teeth (192 / 2 = 96) pushing that lowly 12T pinion. There has to be a better way…

How about we change our simple clockworks mechanism so that it runs half as fast?
Then we would only need a 4:1 ratio if we also used the additional weight pulley.
Getting our clock to run half as fast is easy to do in a couple of ways, but also creates a
problem - our minute hand coming directly off of the center arbor will only be turning
once ever two hours. We will need to compensate for that half speed center arbor, and
we will show how that is done later.

To get a clock to run half as fast we could lengthen the pendulum so that it would beat
half as fast. Sounds easy, right? It would also require the pendulum to be, according to
our pendulum length chart for an 1800bph clock (3600 / 2 = 1800), over 13 feet long.
That’s not going to work well unless you have very tall ceilings…and a ladder.

We could also design a compound pendulum that beats at 1800bph. My Balance has a
compound pendulum that beats 3600 times an hour but is less than 30” in length.
Building my Balance is an easy project, but the actual development of a working
compound pendulum is not, so we won’t be using that strategy here either.

We could double the number of teeth on the escape wheel to 60, as I did on the Genesis
clock. That is an easy and viable way of halving the run time of our 8-day clockworks,
and it requires no increase in drive weight as adding the wind wheel and/or pulleys do.

We could also change the going train to run at half speed, and this option is really where
I’ve been headed all this time. This is an excellent way of getting a longer run time out
of your mechanism. By creating a going train that should operate a 7200 bph
mechanism – in other words, one that is supposed to run at twice the speed of our 3600
bph clock – and then putting a seconds pendulum on it, we have slowed the clock’s
mechanism down by half. This is exactly the mechanism I used in my 8-day Medieval
Astronomical Calendar Clock plan. My Mission has this same clockworks design, too,
and the Mission is one of the smoothest running clocks that I have ever made. My

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Attempt Rack and Snail Striking Clock uses a similar idea for its mechanism, but also
has a second-and-a-quarter pendulum driving it. My point is that this is a great option for
making your clocks run for longer than 30 hours.

How about if we design one that has all of these options; wind wheel, weight pulley, ½
speed mechanism, and 60T escape wheel? Of course, we will need to compensate for
a couple of these variations at the dial train so that we can achieve our goal of getting
our minute hand to go around once per hour.

To make our half-time going train we will need to design one that runs at 7200 bph. We
could do that with a three wheel train, or a four wheel train.

If using the typical 30T escape wheel, a three wheel train would require that each of our
center and third wheels to have about 87.63 teeth each. To get an exact wheel tooth
count we could use a 96T center wheel and an 80T third wheel.

Or, again with our 30T escape wheel, if we wanted to use the four wheel train we could
have a center wheel with 48T, a third wheel with 40T, and a fourth wheel with 32T,
however we could not put on a conventional seconds hand…or could we?

Yes! We can if we use a different type of dial train than we used in our earlier examples.
Because we are using a train that operates at half speed, if we stuck a minute hand on
the center arbor it would also be traveling at half speed, and going around only once
every two hours. That means we need to double the speed of our minute hands
movement. If we change our dial train, and have one that has a 38T pinion on the
center arbor pushing a 19T wheel that has the minute hand attached, our minute hand
will be going around one time per hour. (38 / 19 = 0.5)

Off of that half-speed center wheel arbor we now only need to slow our hour hand by six
times, instead of having to slow it to the usual 1/12th speed. The dial train we could use
to accomplish that could have a 48T wheel being pushed by an 8T pinion. (48 / 8 = 6)

Since there is no intermediate wheel and pinion involved, as there was in our original
dial train (actually, the 38 and 8 wheels on the center wheel arbor are now driven – and
are acting like the original intermediate wheel from the above examples), that means
that to get the hands to operate in the conventional clockwise direction, our center arbor
needs to turn – backwards!

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With the center wheel arbor of a four wheel train turning backwards, the escape arbor, to
which the seconds hand is attached, is then turning in the conventional clockwise
direction, and that’s how we get the seconds hand for this clock.

If our center wheel is turning counterclockwise, our third wheel is turning clockwise, and
our fourth wheel is turning counterclockwise again, making the escape wheel turn in a
clockwise direction. Yay! Seconds hand. (This, of course, would not work with the three
wheel train. The seconds hand in that train would then still be traveling
counterclockwise.)

This is the mechanism in my Mission and Medieval Astronomical Clock designs, but we
were going to also put on a 60T escape wheel, and that will slow it by half again – even
though our seconds hand will be going around the correct direction, it will be taking two
minutes per rotation now, instead of the usual one minute per rotation. If we were to use
a seconds hand while using a 60T escape wheel, we would need to have a chapter ring
that showed 60 seconds going down on the right, and 60 seconds going up on the left.
Because this might cause confusion, I think you might consider leaving off the second
hand from a clock with a 60T escape wheel, and that runs at half speed.

We need to recalculate our dial train again because now with the wheels of what would
have been a 7200bph train, and switching to the 60T escape wheel, our clock is running
four times slower than normal (it would then be a 14400bph mechanism).

That means we need to speed the minute hand by four times and slow the hour hand by
three times. Those are both easy calculations whether done the original way with the
intermediate wheel and the clock’s center arbor running clockwise, or running with the
odd dial train we just made for the center wheel arbor running in the counterclockwise
direction.

To speed our minute hand four times we could use a 32T pushing an 8T, and to slow our
hour hand by three times we could use a 10T pushing a 30T. Here again our total tooth
count is 40, so the (w) will be the same when calculating both sets of wheels. Also,
these numbers (and other numbers, too) can be used, with slight modification, for either
the clockwise or anti-clockwise turning center wheel arbor.

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The introduction of the 60T escape wheel has actually made our 7200bph train into a
14400bph going train. Below is a drawing of the dial train for our 4-times-reduced going
train.

If the intermediate wheel on drawing above were turned by the center wheel arbor, the
center wheel arbor would need to turn counterclockwise to get the hands to turn the
correct direction.

We have our seconds pendulum running our 7200bph mechanism, slowing it by half,
and we have a 60T escape wheel slowing our mechanism by half again, now all we
need to add to our mechanism is a weight pulley to slow the drive weight drop by half
again, and then calculate a wind gear of at least a 2:1 reduction.

One thing we have not discussed is the torque requirements at the wind barrel pulley.
We alluded to it back in the Radians section, but the larger the diameter of the wind
pulley barrel, the easier the clock will run, and the less weight required to drive the clock.
The down side is that the clock won’t run as long on a wind if the wind barrel has a large
diameter - but we also don’t want to have that Volkswagen hanging on our wall to run
our clock. So instead of making our wind wheel only a 2:1 ratio, why not increase the
wind barrel circumference a bit, and then make the wind wheel a 3:1, or 4:1 reduction?

Because we will be rewinding our 8-day clock only once a week, we do not need to
consider adding those extra six hours as we did when calculating our 30 hour clock. We
can simply use a 24 hour day in our calculations.

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What is the daily drop required for a one inch diameter wind barrel? One inch times Pi =
3.1416 times 24 hours = 75.4” of drop per day – or about six and a quarter feet.

What is the daily drop required for a one and a half inch diameter wind barrel? Answer;
113.1” or about nine and a half feet. That is almost 23 extra feet of drop during our
seven day run time, and we will need to compensate for that at our wind wheel.

Fortunately, we already have a 4x reduction because of our 7200bph train and adding
our 60T escape wheel…but we still can’t forget about compensating for our extra wind
pulley radians that may occur on a full wind. We could help solve a bit of that with an
extra wide wind barrel on our wind pulley – but not so wide that it torques our weight
pulley, and makes it hang wonky.

If we have our 8-day clock run 7.5 days total and we used a 1.5” diameter wind barrel,
which would mean our clock would require a 113.1 x 7.5 = 848.25” weight drop. We can
divide that in half for the 7200bph train. Then we can divide that in half for the 60T
escape wheel, and we can divide that in half again for the drive weight pulley. That
leaves us with 848.25/2/2/2 = 106.0 inches of drop that we need to get into a
manageable range for our clock to be able to sit on its shelf, or better yet, in its case
because hanging an 8-day clock on the wall requires a very sturdy shelf to mount it on.
We can also help compensate for this large, 106” drop by setting our clock high, or by
making our case extra tall.

But I digress, we were trying to figure out what wind wheel ratio we should be using on
our clock.

If our clock used a 2:1 wind gear, the drop of our drive weight over the 7.5 days would
be 106.0/2 = 53”. That is very manageable, but what about the radians for an 8-day
wind? And what about the length of that massive weight we will need to drive our clock?
Because of those factors, we would probably do better with a 3:1 ratio wind wheel, which
is calculated as 106/3 = 35.33” of drop per week. And with that, we won’t even need to
set our clock that high up…unless we wanted to.

The 36” of drop per week on this train is about on par with the drop of most of my 30
hour clocks, but look at all we had to go through to get there! That’s why you don’t see
many 8-day clocks on my website, and those that I have created are all in Masochist’s
Corner.

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Here are two examples of the 8-day clock we just designed. To double the tooth count
on our escape wheel we also needed to increase the diameter of that wheel. Because
of that, the rest of the wheels in the train also needed to be much larger, the inline
design that we used on our simple, 30 hour clock (shown here on the right) seems much
too tall. Notice the location of the pendulum bob. The clock on the left is not only
arranged better, but also turned upside down to give us a longer distance for the weight
to drop. To give you some scale, that 60T escape wheel necessarily needed to be extra
large, and it now has a diameter of 8.5”.

Normally, in our 30 hour clocks, the hands are attached to the center wheel arbor. In
both of the designs shown above, the center wheel arbor has the intermediate wheel
attached to it, and the intermediate wheel is then pushing the minute and hour hand
wheels that are using an extension of the next arbor up the train to rotate upon. Having
our hands using an extension of the third wheel arbor gives us a lot of latitude in
designing our clocks, because we can put the hands nearly anywhere we would like to
have them, so that they can be the central focus of our design.

Usually we mount our clocks so that the arbor containing the hands is set at about 68”
above the floor. When we set the hands of the left hand design at 68”, we have about
40” of drop for the drive weight. That gives up plenty of drop for our 8-day mechanism.

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When we check the drop on the inline design on the right, we only end up with about 23”
of drop with the hands at 68”. That means we will need to hang that tall clock at least
13” higher on the wall. That tells us that even though that design would work, it may not
be as comfortable a design to view, or even wind.

Also, seeing the pendulum swinging on our clocks is part of the fun. The design on the
right hides the pendulum behind its wall of wheels.

A Few Thoughts About Other Possible Configurations

For Our 8-Day:
The clock we just designed needed to have very large wheels because of the 60T
escapement. That extra size in the escape wheel gave us the extra room needed for the
30 additional teeth on the escape wheel, and the necessary strength we needed in the
pallet arms that connect the pallet faces to the pallet pivot point.

If you prefer building a clock with smaller wheels, the 60T escape wheel could be
exchanged for the normal 30T escape wheel. The problem with that exchange is that an
escape wheel with a larger number of teeth takes no more drive weight than an escape
wheel with a small number of teeth, but by removing the 60T from our mechanism, the
doubling of the run time that it gave us has to be replaced by some other system.

Since our 8-day mechanism presently uses a 3:1 ratio wind wheel, a 6:1 ratio wind
wheel could be used to substitute for the loss of the doubling that our 60T had given us.
Unfortunately though, a higher ratio wind wheel would require additional drive weight –
doubling the drive weight in this case.

A side benefit, however, to using the 6:1 ratio wind wheel and the 30T escape wheel is
that now we could opt for a normal seconds hand for the face of our clock.

So switching to a 30T escape wheel would allow us to design a much smaller

clockworks and have a useable seconds hand, but would require double the drive
weight.

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Bringing the 8-Day Clockworks Design Together
Let’s do one more example of an 8-day clock. This time let’s lengthen the pendulum so
that it beats slower than our normal one second beat. Let’s calculate a mechanism that
has a second and a quarter between each beat. A 1.25 second per beat pendulum
actually beats at 0.8 beats per second, however it is beats per hour that we need to do
our calculations. So to turn seconds per beat into beats per second we simply invert and
get;

1 / 1.25 = 0.8 beats per second

0.8 bps x 60 seconds x 60 minutes = 2880 beats per hour

And from our chart back on page 11, we can see that a 2880bph theoretical pendulum
should be about 59 inches long. This is a good example of theoretical versus reality
because I know from building my Attempt, a 2880bph mechanism, that the actual
pendulum length required is 72 inches. That is a whopping 13” longer than
recommended by the chart.

With this clock how about if we will use the traditional 30T escape wheel, but we will
double the going train, mess around with the dial train to compensate, and run it all with
a 6:1 ratio wind wheel that has a doubling weight pulley hanging from it?

We have our escape wheel already drawn from our 30 hour clock design, so now all we
need is the doubled going train to halve the run time. That means we will be creating for
our 1.25 second pendulum, a 2880bph x 2 = 5760bph going train, and in this example
we will continue to use the 8T pinions throughout. To calculate the going train we divide
the 5760bph by the 30(2) escape, and multiply by the three pinions to get;

5760 / 60 = 96, and then 96 x 8 x 8 x 8 = 49152. Now we find three numbers which
when multiplied together give us 49152. One of those sets of numbers happens to be
48, 32 and 32, which gives us our doubled going train for our 1.25 seconds per beat, 72”
long pendulum. For the 6:1 ratio wind we could easily use a 60T wheel pushing a 10T
pinion, and we have completed our halved going train.

So our wheel count is; 60/10 wind wheel set, 48/8 center wheel set, 32/8 third wheel set,
32/8 fourth wheel set, 30(2) escape wheel = 5760bph. However, since our mechanism

95
will be running at half speed, we will need to double the rate that the minute hand goes
around and slow the rate by six times that the hour hand revolves. If we have the
intermediate wheel with an 8T and 38T pinion attached to the center arbor, and the 8T
pushes a 48T wheel we will have our 1:6 reduction for our hour hand. And if the 38T
pinion from our intermediate wheel pushes a 19T wheel, we will have the 2:1
acceleration for our minute hand.

With this arrangement we will also be able to use the escape arbor for a seconds hand,
should we want one.

Below is the drawing of the 5760bph 8-day clock with the 72 Inch pendulum we just
created. Notice that the center wheel is not in the center. The hands will again come off
of an extension of the third wheel arbor - upon which they simply rotate. The
intermediate wheel is made by gluing the 38T and the 8T together and fixing them to the
center wheel arbor where they will drive the freely turning 19T and 48T, to which are
attached the minute and hour hands respectively. Notice also that I have centered the
escape wheel with the pendulum and weight so that if someone should want to add a
seconds hand to the escape arbor, the seconds hand could be centered in any face they
would like to apply to this clock.

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Let’s make some improvements to the 8-day clock above. Remember when we
discussed earlier that when we use 10 or 12 toothed pinions we get a smoother running
mechanism with lower internal friction? Let’s change the all-8-toothed-pinion 5760bph
mechanism that we just created above, into an all-10-toothed-pinion 5760bph - and for
fun, let’s also add an hourly strike mechanism. That will mean we need to cut a few
more teeth, but also that our mechanism will run more smoothly.

We will be adding the hourly strike detent to the 8T wheel of this dial train. The dial train
will be on the outside of the frame, and that’s where we will also mount our strike
mechanism’s hammer assembly.

Because we will be adding the hourly strike detent to the 8T pinion, and the 8T pinion
mounted to the center wheel arbor, and the center wheel arbor will be turning at half
speed, we will need to have an hourly strike detent with two arms so that our clock will
strike every hour. That two-armed hourly strike detent is shown in two places in
5760bph clock drawing below. One of those detents is shown attached to the 8T pinion
of the dial train, and the other is shown where it will actually be located on the front of
the clock. Note that there is actually only one hourly strike detent. The two shown
below are the same detent.

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Here is how this clocks hourly passing strike mechanism works. As the hourly strike
detent is rotated by the center wheel arbor, the detent will gently begin to push on the
rocker detent, lifting the arm of the hammer assembly. As the strike detent passes
below the rocker detent, the hammer assembly is loosed, the arm falls back onto the
rocker detent, and the bell is struck.

If you would like your clock to strike every half hour, you can add two more arms to the
strike detent, and then your clock will strike on the hour and half hour.

One could also stack two hammer assemblies on the same arbors and off-set each of
the hourly strike detents so that they have something like the half-hour strike
configuration shown below. That way the back hammer assembly would ring one bell
every hour, and the front hammer assembly could ring another different sounding bell on
the half hour. That way the half hour bell will be struck at both the hour and half hour.
These mechanisms are happy to support whatever suits your fancy.

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You probably have also noticed that the ratio of the wheel sets in the going train needs
to be changed since we changed all of the pinions to have 10 teeth. The ratios for a
smoother running clockworks are;

60/10 for the wind wheel, then 50/10 for the center wheel, 48/10 for the third wheel,
40/10 for the fourth wheel, and the same 30 tooth escape wheel we used in the previous
example, this gives us a mechanism that is made to beat at 5760bph. There are other
combinations possible, but this one gives us a good descending number of teeth – and
thus gear ratios - on each of the wheel sets.

Again we will be using the 1.25 second per beat, 72 inch pendulum to slow the
mechanism by half, and with the hourly strike mechanism, and the 10 toothed pinions
throughout, we should have a fantastic running machine! I like this one so much that I
may make a plan available for it!

So much of the fun of designing these wonderful mechanisms is in playing with all of
these variables to get just the right clock for your home.

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Glossary of Terms

Arbor - the wood or metal shaft supporting the wheel or pinion.

Bob – the usually adjustable mass at the end of a pendulum by which we can exactly regulate
the pendulum’s beat.

Bushings, brass – a misplaced idea that is a common cause of stopped clocks. Forget about
them. They are a waste of your time and they stop clocks dead.

Center of gravity or center of mass - is a point that may be used for a summary description of
gravitational interactions. That’s the Wikipedia definition. Confused? We will simply
use the center of our bob as our center of gravity. Close enough.

Circumference - the distance around the outside of a circle that is found by the equation
Circumference = 2Pi x radius or Pi x diameter

Click gear - a one-way gear used in the rewind system of our clocks. The click gear should be
made of the highest quality ply because each tooth is required to support the entire drive
weight of the clock.

Clicks - mate with the click gear to prevent the movement of the click gear in one direction.

Crown wheel – is the escape wheel of a verge and foliot type clock. It is called this because
instead of teeth radiating from the circumference of the wheel, as with most escape
wheels, the crown wheel has pins emerging perpendicular to the wheel – thus giving it
the appearance of a ‘crown’. These pins transmit the force from the crown wheel into
the ‘flags’ or pallet faces that are attached to the verge.

Depthing - a procedure that makes sure we have the correct action between the wheel and its
pinion. Each single wheel set is placed into the frame and tested for any binding by
gently blowing on the large wheel. Each wheel set should be perfectly free moving.
That wheel set is then removed from the frame, and the next wheel set in the train is
placed into the frame for testing. This procedure is continued until all of the wheel sets

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 have been tested individually, and each found to have perfectly free motion without any
binding.

Dial train - the reducing wheels that allow the hour hand to move 12 times slower than the
minute hand. The dial train is also called the motion work.

Drive pulley - has the drive weight attached to it via the weight cord. The weight cord wraps
around the drive pulley’s central barrel, and transmits the motive (driving) force to the
clock.

Drive weight – a mass that is the motive force for the clock.

Escape wheel - the last wheel in the going train, and one that matches with the pallets to allow
the slow release of the motive force.

Escapement - allows for the motive force to drop (escape) slowly over time.

Finish - something not to be gotten on the tooth surfaces of your wheels and pinions, or in arbor
holes or on arbor rods.

Flags – the pallet faces that are attached to the verge rod of a Verge and Foliot type
escapement.

Foliot - the horizontal rod of the Verge and Foliot type of escapement.

Going train - the wheels and pinions of the clock that have the proper ratios to get the minute
hand to go around one time per hour.

Great wheel - also called the Wind wheel and is usually the wheel with the drive weight
attached, and is an extra set of wheels below the going train that gives the clock a longer
run time.

Lantern pinion - a pinion using rods instead of ‘teeth’ or leaves.

Leaves - what the ‘teeth’ of pinions are actually called by clock makers.

Motion work - another name for the dial train which are the reducing wheels that allow the hour
hand to move 12 times slower than the minute hand.

Motive force - is the driving force of the clock – it can be a weight or spring.

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(n) - number. Usually used here as the number of teeth on a wheel or pinion.

OD – is the outside diameter and is found by the equation OD = PD/(n)/(n+2)

Pallets - the part of the escapement that gives impulse to the pendulum, and that rocks into the
escape wheel allowing for the slowed release of the motive force.

PD – is the pitch diameter and is found by the equation PD = (n) x (w) / Pi

Pendulum - the timing device for a clock.

Pi = 3.1416

Plate - what the front and back ‘frames’ are actually called in clock making.

Radian - is the ratio between the length of an arc and its radius.

Roller trundle pinion - a lantern pinion with rollers for trundles.

Seconds pendulum - a pendulum that has a period of one second in each direction of its
swing.

Strike, counting - a separate train in the clock that allows it to strike the correct number of
times for the hour shown on the clock’s face. For example, one strike for one o’clock,
two strikes for two o’clock, etc.

Strike, hourly – another name for ‘passing strike’ in which the clock strikes once each passing
hour.

Strike, passing – another name for an ‘hourly strike’ in which the clock strikes once each
passing hour.

Train, clock – the wheels and pinions that make up the ‘time side’ of a clock and allow for the
minute hand to go around one time per hour.

Train, dial – another name for a clock’s ‘motion work’ which are the reducing wheels that allow
the hour hand to move 12 times slower than the minute hand thus making two trips
around the dial in 24 hours.

Train, going – same as the ‘clock train’ which are the wheels and pinions that make up the
‘time side’ of a clock and allow for the minute hand to go around one time per hour.

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Trundles - rods or rollers used as ‘teeth’ in a lantern pinion.

Teeth – are the protrusions from the wheel that mate with the leaves of a pinion or teeth of
another wheel. Teeth are made up of both the addendum above the PD and the
dedendum below the PD.

Third wheel, many times the second wheel in the going train. (Ha! that’s true!) The third wheel
is usually the wheel between the center wheel and the escape wheel.

Tooth – see “Teeth” above.

Uniframe – a clock that uses only a single ‘plate’ or frame.

Verge – the vertical rod in a Verge and Foliot type escapement upon which the ‘flags’ or pallets
are attached so as to transmit the force from the escape or crown wheel.

(w) - width of a single tooth plus a single space at the PD. The distance from one edge of a
tooth at the PD to that same edge on the next tooth’s PD.

Weight pulley – is the pulley that is attached to the drive weight. A single weight pulley is used
in a clock to double the run time, however, when using a weight pulley, doubling of the
drive weight may also be required.

Wheel – is what clock makers call their large gears.

Wind wheel – is the wheel to which the drive weight, and rewind pulley are attached. Usually
the lowest wheel in the going train, and also sometimes called the Great Wheel.

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