Clocks and Clockmaking
Work on the skeleton clock has continued this week but I have spent quite a lot of time watching auctions on e-Bay for cases for grandfather clocks. The prices that are being realised are amazing! There was one case that fetched £450 and several have reached over £300.
There is even one unfinished case on offer at £250 that the seller states is less than the cost price of the oak it is made out of. This means that the material cost of the case is greater than the material cost of the movement. The Hipp movement clock now running in our dining room has less than £100 of material in it, even allowing for the amount of scrap that ended up in the bin during the learning process.
There is a fair amount of work to do on tooling before I can think about building another clock from scratch. In particular I need to construct a better way of cutting wheels than I have used in the past. The Hipp movement did not need many wheels and I used a fairly crude dividing mechanism to cut thbasicallyicly wooden disks with band-saw blade around the perimeter mounted on the lather headstock. The method works but it is very easy to make a mistake and the backlash between saw teeth can cause inaccuracies. Tony Jeffree has published a design for a simple dividing head suitable for use with my Taig/Peatol lathe and I think I will build something along those lines. I might look on e-Bay first though!
Categories: Clocks, Clockmaking
There is even one unfinished case on offer at £250 that the seller states is less than the cost price of the oak it is made out of. This means that the material cost of the case is greater than the material cost of the movement. The Hipp movement clock now running in our dining room has less than £100 of material in it, even allowing for the amount of scrap that ended up in the bin during the learning process.
There is a fair amount of work to do on tooling before I can think about building another clock from scratch. In particular I need to construct a better way of cutting wheels than I have used in the past. The Hipp movement did not need many wheels and I used a fairly crude dividing mechanism to cut thbasicallyicly wooden disks with band-saw blade around the perimeter mounted on the lather headstock. The method works but it is very easy to make a mistake and the backlash between saw teeth can cause inaccuracies. Tony Jeffree has published a design for a simple dividing head suitable for use with my Taig/Peatol lathe and I think I will build something along those lines. I might look on e-Bay first though!
Categories: Clocks, Clockmaking
posted by Richard Galle at 9:19 am
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