da Vinci clock progress

Here below is my da Vinci clock finally finished and quickly shot in my studio as I'm excited to start on my next building project. Its tick tocking away and moving while in this shot as the speed weight adjustment the horizontal ball and 2 balls at the top is spinning. Pretty happy.

Well I've finally finished the clock, it took about 8 hours to make. I had to make a few minor modifications to the clock, fortunately I had the tools Amazingly it works, it goes "click clunk click clunk", however it does not yet tell accurate time. I timed it and 2.30min on the da Vinci clock was 5min on the stopwatch on my iPhone. It uses coins as the ballast for the counterweight, I only had 5c pieces however I feel that 10c pieces that will solve the timing problem without having to readjust the cog ratios. In the image above I've now changed the counterweight on the left to 10 cent pieces.

Here is a progress shot including my origami baseball cap.

I've started making Leonardo da Vinci's clock, and made good progress tonight. So far so good, I'm currently working on the counterweight and the balance issue. It seems to be quite finally balanced in terms of the seconds and how the cog spins and engauges the bigger cog. Time (pardon the chronological pun) will tell about how tightly I have to set the timing. I love making things and solving these things through thought and trial and error.

I was working to the timing of the minutes last night and altered changing the size of cogs which alter the ratios and ended up with a 60:1, so 60 minutes in a hour.

I was very excited to buy a model clock to build, based on the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519). The model can be built in two versions, desk top or wall mounted, I'm building the desk top version. The model which I started today is a working model which uses a pendulum weight as its power source.

Da Vinci who designed this clock hundreds of years before the English man John Harrison (1693 - 1776) invented the first actual wooden maritime chronometer which helped the English empire dominate the seas for centuries...... The empire on which the sun never set. If you are interested Dava Strobel wrote a fascinating book on this subject called Longitude in 1988 which I've read and throughly enjoyed, being a great lover of history. A great ripping yarn.