The Creation of a Turret Clock

Thinking can be dangerous...

  Allright, all this work on the clock has gotten me thinking about techniques for different parts of the clock.  One of the most critical areas, for obvious reasons, is the teeth on the gears.  The cutting of these teeth has to be pretty precise.  When I did the wooden clock, I cheated.  I wrote a simple computer program to automatically draw the gear for me.  I would then take that pattern, glue it to the wood and cut out.  I could produce one of the larger gears in an hour or two.

  For this clock, I want to be much more authentic so I'm not going to cheat by using a computer drawn pattern like that.  Much of the layout work will be done using a compass.  My greatest area of concern has been the actual cutting of the teeth.  Because I will be using a hacksaw and files to cut the teeth, I was worried that it would be easy to screw up by cutting at a bad angle or cutting too deep.  Then, I realized a technique on the posts would be perfect here.  I created a template for the posts then I clampled the template and the new post together.  I could then use the hacksaw through the template to get an exact copy on the new post of the cuts.  I can do the same thing for the gears.

  What I realized was that I can create one template that has two gear teeth and the cuts for the opening between the teeth.  Then, for each tooth on the gear, I can clamp the template onto the gear and perform the cuts.  This, in theory, should give me nearly identical teeth around the whole gear.

  The other bad part of thinking?  I realized that for some of the larger gears, I will essentially be cutting about 6-8 feet of 1/2 inch steel using the hacksaw just because of the number of teeth involved.