Hi,
Looking good, I think the stain has much improved the look of the wood, sort of mellowing it. I was wondering, what are the bearings lubricated with? I am familiar with the wooden framed clocks that were made in the Black forest many years ago which had wooden frames and arbors, beech I think, but had brass wheels, steel pivots and brass bushes in the frame. The bushes were made from rolled up sheet brass so the oil could leach into the wooden frame so they needed fairly frequent lubrication.
Take care Tony.
Hello Tony, much to my surprise, the axles that do not see much load from the weight drive like the hour wheel and minute wheel are just little plywood circles that fit in holes in the frame, I have done the graphite burnish treatment on these as well.
The heavily loaded gears(from weight drive) are small Diameter harden steel pins similar to dowel pins with a good surface finish, these also just fit into slip fit wooden holes in the frame. No graphite will stick to the dowel pins, but I do spin the pencil lead in the wooden hole, it is surprising how long a single gear will spin in this hole(tested during construction) however it seems like these would wear oval over time. I may harden these holes with super glue as well in hopes of adding some longevity to the clock. Also the pendulum pivot is the lower drag small dowel pin construction.
Thanks for the compliment on the stain color, I feel most anything would be an improvement over the bare blonde plywood. As there is not much attractive grain to plywood, it's kind of hard to know what to use for stain, I was mostly trying to avoid a blotchy look. The color I used was Kiwi Mid-Tan shoe polish. I applied with a shoe brush while the parts where still in there webs and it goes pretty quick. You can see some of the parts are not as dark(frame) then the hour and minute wheels, this is my fault, I did zero sanding! The frame sheets where very smooth and the hour and minute wheels could have used a light block sanding with maybe 600-800 grit. The nice thing about the shoe polish is you can slowly build richer color by keep loading your shoe brush and brushing more. I just tried to make each sheet look even and let dry overnight, the next morning I was eager to begin construction, but could have layed out all the sheets and give the lighter ones a second coat.
Photo: The clock is now temporarily mounted to the wall, I still have about 20% more of the instruction book to go, but it seems we do the final build phase on the wall to avoid tangled weight lines and also the little hot air balloon complication runs on a monofiliment fishing line. I may blacken the hands and numbers to make them easy to read at distance.
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