THE
SPEAR POINT DIAMOND
CLOCK KIT
For quite some time I've been wanting to develop a design for an "industrial" looking shop clock for guys like us – something you'd never see in a store, and which looks like it might have been made by some long-ago machinist on a ship or in a mobile army workshop during WW2, without regard to how long it took him.
The above photo shows what I came up with. At 13" across, this clock is big enough to be impressive, and you won't see anything like it in a store.
The diamond-shaped frame plates are spaced 3/4" apart with shop-made spacers, and the dial is spaced another 1/8" or so out from the front frame plate. The spaces between these three parts make for an interesting 3-dimensional or shadow effect.
I made the prototype you see above from 22 gage CRS sheet, cutting out the two spear point diamond pieces with a cold chisel, and then cleaning up the chisel cut edges by filing carefully down to my layout lines. The dial was cut close to finished size on a slitting shear, the edge was filed down to the layout line, and then the face of the dial was polished nice and smooth. Finally, the various holes were marked out and punched in all 3 pieces.
Each of the three main pieces took me well over an
hour to lay out, cut out, file, punch and polish, so I guess that
satisfies the ".....without regard to how long it took him....." part.
:-)
I chose to
use screws for hour markers, instead of etching numbers on the
clock dial, as this seemed simpler, and in
keeping with the industrial look I wanted.
WHAT'S IN THE KIT?
The kit includes the dial
and the 2
diamond-shaped frame plates; also screws, nuts, and a piece of 5/16"ø
CRS. The 3 sheet steel parts are laser cut from stainless steel, and will need
only a little work with a
file to be ready to use. All the holes are
laser cut, and should require no further work, beyond perhaps passing a
twist drill of the next larger size through them. The clock uses
a
battery-operated quartz movement, which is supplied, as are a set of
hands. The movement requires one AA-size battery, which is not included.
To finish the clock, you'll only need
to make the spacers - 4 little pieces of round
CRS bar, faced to
uniform length, and drilled and tapped 10-32 end-to-end, plus 4
little clearance drilled spacers
for behind the dial. These 8
spacers are made from the 5/16"ø CRS material supplied in the kit.
Obviously, this is not a demanding project - anyone with a lathe should be able to complete the kit in one or two evenings - but when it's done you'll have a distinctive clock that none of your friends will have.
You can add any custom touches you might like, such as polishing the brushed stainless steel finish to a fancier appearance, before assembling everything.
NOTE: Because the clock kits are cut
from stainless steel, a clock made
from the kit will have a much
"brighter" look to it than my satin polished CRS
prototype, which is
shown in the photo above.
To see 4 photos of a clock I made up from one of these kits, click here. Two things to notice on these photos are as follows: first, that a photo editing function called "Sharpen" was used on them, which has caused the grain effect on the stainless steel diamond plates to be somewhat over-emphasized; second, that I fancied up the dial on this particular one to a certain degree. You can do something similar, or entirely different, if you want, or leave it plain.
As usual with things from me, you'll get a few extras with this kit, including a good tip on how to do layout work without leaving unsightly scribe marks all over your work. (In spite of the fact that no layout work is required in completing this kit, this interesting and useful tip worked its way into the instructions in an earlier stage in the kit's development, when I was going to leave all the layout work and hole-drilling work to be done by the customer. Laser cutting made it easy to eliminate all this work (as well as the cold chisel and file work!), but the tip referred to above has been left in the instructions that come with the kit.)
Kit price: US$75 + $5 shipping to
destinations in the continental USA.
Canadian Customers: Cdn$98
(including GST) + $9 for surface postage within Canada.
BC residents please add $6.41 PST.
(Canadian customers in the Harmonized
Tax Zone deduct 7% GST, and then add 15% HST (or e-mail me for correct
amount
to send).
NOTE: Please put your e-mail address on your order, so I can e-mail you the instructions for completing the clock.
Click here to go to my home page.
Click here
to go to my "clockplans" page.
Click here to
see a clock built from this kit by one of my customers.