Five-Axle Stepper Motor Clock

thingiverse

I designed this clock to be small so it would fit inside a top hat. I am making a steam punk costume with a clock inside the hat and I wanted it to have visible gears. Despite the ubiquity of clocks, there is not a lot of easily accessible information on designing a clock from scratch. So, this design took weeks of research and much trial and error. This model is the result and is entirely my own design. I did not try to make movement mechanism. Instead, I bought a stepper motor and hardware to run the motor at 1 RPM. This motor drives the second hand axle. If there is any interest, I can post more details on the electronics. However, I basically programmed an ardiuno to run the stepper motor. The bearings in this clock are standard skateboard bearings. I got the cheapest ones I could find ($10 for 8). They are 22mm on the outside and 8mm on the inside and 7mm thick. This version is actually a five-axle clock. I improved the design to require less gears. See the clock running in "break-In" mode here: https://youtu.be/JpaEKej01mE. You can see there is a little hitch in the gears caused by the 3D printing process. I am running the clock faster than normal to get those bumps to smooth out.