I thought it was about time I posted the progress of the hybrid clock I’ve been working on. It’s been hanging on the wall, keeping time for a week now. The gear behind the hands will be spoked, as delicate and sparse as possible, to show off the smaller gears behind it. Right now, it’s solid, and it’s tricky to see what the end product will look like. All I have to do at this point is cut the spokes on the gears, grind the metal to shape, and put on the finishing touches. My next post, in a few weeks, will be the finished clock.

Here’s a link to the press release for the upcoming show in NY. I’m planning a trip to attend the opening. It will be the public debut of “No.7″, which I highly recommend seeing in person.

Some of you may have noticed that the dates on the above advertisement have changed. I have confirmed that the ones shown here, and on the press release site, are final, and correct. Hope to see you there!

Quite often I receive e-mails asking how one might get into clockmaking. My typical response, is to direct them to a couple of books that they can buy. These two texts give a step by step process to build a clock, which in turn gives an idea of what tooling, materials, and hours are needed. From there, it’s easier to decide if it’s worth the leap.

The book I followed to complete my first clock was by W.R. Smith, and was titled “How to make a skeleton wall clock”. It’s not a hardcover, and it’s not in color. In fact it’s bound with one of those tube-like plastic d.i.y. bindings, and it cost $45. It is, however, more than worth it. The pages in that book are saturated with clockmaking techniques that are gold to someone starting out. The other book that I recommend, which is quite similar in concept, is by John Wilding. Its titled “How to make an 8 day weight driven wall clock”. This one is also very easy for a beginner to understand. It’s less specific, but that’s what I like about it. It offers different ways to approach the exact same things executed in Smith’s book. Comparing the two as I went along sometimes helped get a more complete picture of what I was making.

I should add, that I deviated quite a bit from their designs to make “No.1″ as you see it in the gallery of this site. The concept, and visual idea for what I do now came before I learned how to make clocks; therefore a traditional look never crossed my mind. Many of the mechanical techniques that I use are unorthodox as well, born from the demands of this non-traditional aesthetic. I’ve sort of bullied the rules around, because I needed to know how far I could push things. If you’re going to design your own clock works, and you decide to veer from the beaten horological path, you’ll have to decide how much work you’re willing to risk on a design that may not tick.

In creating my limited group of mechanical strange-works, I’ve seen the whole spectrum; from success to heart breaking failure. I’ve had pieces that are accurate within seconds a week, and I’ve had pieces that are off over a minute a day. I even had one that kept stopping, and never quite worked at all. For me, as long as I don’t pull any punches visually, and I learn something from each piece, it’s a success.

I’ve just finished the rim of the clock face. To get this shape, I mounted the bent piece of brass to my rotary table, and trued it up with a standard square end-mill cutter. Then I attacked it with my newly-acquired, large, round-nosed mill cutter. This gave it that nice radius on the inside of the lip. Finally, I indexed some plunge cuts with the square cutter, and drilled holes for the screws that will later adorn the rim of the clock. I roughly cut it from the rest of the stock, and sort of haphazardly laid everything out on stilts of brass scrap, just to get an idea of what it will look like.

This is always an exciting time in the process for me, because I really start to see, in scale, what it will look like. I like the way the lip came out. It’s nice and thick – the round cutter really did the trick.

I’m not sure, but I think the next step will be cutting the gears. Since all of my old posts disappeared when I updated the site, it would be good to throw up a new post showing the gear-cutting process.

After a couple months of website neglect, I thought it might be about time to let everyone know what I’ve been up to. The truth is, I’ve got a few too many irons in the fire right now, but I’m alright with that. Having to decide which interesting thing to do next is a good problem to have.

Much of my time since the last post went toward a recent class that I went back to CCS (my old college) to take. Many people look at the work I’ve done in the past, and believe that I cast everything. The truth is, everything I make is machined first, to ensure accuracy, and then is ground with a rotary tool to get all of the contouring. It’s a long, wasteful, and painful process, but it works.

So why learn to cast metal now? Two things prompted the decision. One, was the undertaking of “No.7″. That clock was so large, that it took a ridiculous amount of grinding. To do more work on that scale, it may be worth it to find a way to combine the process of metal-casting with the accuracy of machining. The other thing, is that I’ve been considering making limited runs of smaller pieces. In order to get something cast in multiples, I thought I should understand the process, so I can more easily talk to the vendors. It was great to visit my old college again, and it was VERY fun pouring a giant vat of molten metal into the investments!

So that was one of the irons in the fire, but it caused me to do a lot of thinking about my process, and what’s next. For a while there, I was mentally being pulled in a few directions at once. It was hard to make a decision and keep going.

But – now I’m going again. I’ve been working on the hybrid clock from the last post, and in its construction, I’ve also tried some new things. This one is going to be large, for a quartz piece. In order to make the rim of the face large, and thick, to match the clock, I did something different this time. I bought some 1 1/4 inch square bar, and I took it to a place to have it bent, hydraulically, into a perfect radius. I’m going to machine it further on my rotary table, and the end result should look great. You can see the two rolled bars off to the side of the photo. The straight parts will be removed once I finish machining everything. It might seem a little confusing in the photo, but it will all make sense when I get it assembled. It’s going to be around 3ft X 3ft.

A few other odds and ends:

Last year, I poured a lot of time into planning for a very large commission, that unfortunately is either on hold, or not happening at all. Work will go on as usual; no point in holding my breath. This whole process did get me thinking about how to tackle large scale projects, and as a result, I have some innovative things that I’ll post in the future.

Also, this June, I’ll be bringing a couple of pieces to a gallery in New York for a show. A lot of preparation is going to be required just to transport, and display them. I’ll post more details on everything later, but if you’re in the area at the end of June, you can see “No.7″ on display, and ticking for the first time in a public show! Opening night is June 28th, and it will hang for three months.

That’s all for now. I’ve got a lot to catch up on, but I don’t want to overload this post. More to come soon!

Here’s the next piece that I’ll be working on. In 2008, I finished a clock that was titled “Quartz 7″. I wonder if that one should have been “Hybrid No.1″, because it was my first clock that used working handmade gears, as well as a maintenance free quartz motor. The in-progress piece represented in this concept drawing will be of the same kind, only larger. I’m actually surprised that it took me this long to begin work on another hybrid, because Quartz 7 is one of my favorites.

This is the first of three hybrid clocks that I have planned for completion in 2012. This type of clock is a good option for me, because it showcases the handmade gears, but is much easier to ship, and take care of. I also like the options it opens up for me aesthetically. The gears allow me to offset the hidden motor, and remove half of the clock face.

This is the first post, on my new website! It’s been a long time coming, but I wanted to get it right this time. Anyone that visited the old one will notice that everything functions about the same. The same five categories are across the top, and each one is very similar; but things have been cleaned up considerably. WordPress was used this time as the backbone for the site. Being the popular blog giant that it is, many plug-ins and features have accumulated over the years to ensure we could more easily make it function the desired way. The result is, everything is much easier for me to use on my end, and hopefully easier to look at on your end!

It was quite awhile ago, that work began on re-skinning my old website. First and foremost, there were some funky issues with the gallery. I’m not a programmer, so I couldn’t explain it if I tried, but in attempting to add another category, some twitchy things started to happen. In discussing options to fix it, I realized that you had to click five times, just to see one decent sized picture of a clock. Actually, you had to click a few times to see anything, even a thumbnail! It’s was entirely my doing. I wanted everything sectioned off into categories, and sub categories, with descriptions and groups for each clock. Anyone visiting for the first time may not even bother, and may never see my work! Now I have categories, but within each, there’s just a block of thumbs laid out to be clicked. You can use the arrow keys to toggle through the images as well, in a familiar “lightbox style” display. Also, the default is the “mechanical” section, and without doing anything, the thumbs for those images are already on the screen.

The other noticeable change is the shop. I’ve been selling my quartz work through the site. On several occasions, the sale wouldn’t go through, due to, well, something (I’m still not sure what the error was). This was completely unacceptable to me, and I was pretty mad about the situation. When someone decides to spend $1,000 plus dollars on my work, the last thing I want is extra hassle for a buyer, and issues that diminish their confidence in the whole transaction! I’m now using a “big cartel” shop. While it isn’t custom designed to blend in with the site flawlessly, it always works flawlessly.

There’s some cosmetic changes as well. The background is pretty easy for me to swap out, so when I finish new work, I can showcase it there, as well as the blog, and the gallery. I’ve also worked on a logo that I’ll be using on things now, and I wanted to put that on the site.

I can re-write the bio pretty easily too. It’s about due for an update, so I’ll have to look at that soon.

One more thing: The gallery now has a category for tattoos. I set aside a block of photos for all of the die hard fans that decided to ink some clockwork on themselves. If you’re one of the people pictured in the gallery, and I somehow missed your name, or the tattoo artists name, let me know, and I’ll be happy to add it! Also, if for some reason you don’t want to be pictured at all, let me know, and I’ll remove any photos of you, and your ink!

On the next few posts, I’ll show you what I’ve been up to while waiting for the site to be completed.

Thanks for visiting!