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.