Proudest WW moment (to date)

Background
Some of you may of been thinking that I had given up the woodworking all together given my lack of post lately. Well I have fallen into the wood workers trap, one of them anyway. Too many projects and none getting finished. This is not all my fault but some serious procrastination has been involved as well.

September 2009 my sister is getting married to her childhood sweetheart who she has reunited with after 30+ separation through Facebook. What does she want as a wedding present, “Ohhh I would love a clock”. ‘Bother’ or words to that effect. Well I was already working on a table for a friend so I thought finish the table work on the clock, easy I have a year (wedding scheduled for September 2010). Well the table is still not finished (guilty of hitting above my weight on that one), the wedding is been and gone; and the clock is just finished. Understanding sister thankfully, especially when I explained how much it was costing me.

Design
There were a number of problems that had to be resolved, the mechanism and the design being the main ones. I wanted a mechanical mechanism but I did not want to pay the $1000 plus for all the bits from the retailer. So I bought a dodgy old clock that still worked and pulled it apart. Dont worry the case of the old one was all ply and very ragged. For the design I tried to think of something to reflect ideas such as ‘love’ (the wedding), guitars (Peter plays very well), or nursing (Heather is a nurse). Hours of sketching ideas gave me nothing so I made a design that I thought was a good one, my own but based on something I have seen.

Construction
The case is a solid wood construction from New Guinea Rose Wood. It has a floating panel back and a MDF housing for the mechanism. It was built as a solid box and the door was then cut off. This required the first pin had to be 2mm bigger than all the others to accommodate the 2mm blade cutting it in half. Because the tail on the side of the door was set by the distance from the clock face to the clock window, I decided to make their size incrementally larger because the size did not space evenly across the side (I think it works really well).

The half blind dovetails on the side were my first ever, woo hoo. Gotta be happy with that, but I will probably stuff the next ones. Hehe

The mechanism is suspended on an an MDF frame to avoid any problems from wood movement. The clock face is a Rock Maple veneer over a 3mm MDF substrate for the same reason. The Rock Maple is repeated in a detail on the side of the door

Lessons
Some of these lessons were a bit harsh, especially because I knew them but life is a harder teacher/reminder.
+ Timber does not like to be left in a car in summer.
+ The MDF frame for the mechanism did not need to be as big as I made it.
+ Procrastination can lead to its own problems.
+ Veneering is harder than it looks.

I gotta tell you, I love this clock. Heather is under orders that when the time comes it has to come back to my son (she has no children of her own).

Expect more soon

Doug

PS It is finished, not having numbers or dial marks is intensional. This was inspired by Krenov’s clock.

-- Living is a constant gamble, life is about working the odds in your favour