So I got back to the forge for a little bit today before the weather turned sour. I began to work on thinning out the foliot when I noticed a small problem from yesterday got much worse. Bad cracks appeared in the wrought iron and showed signs of getting steadily worse. It appears that the wrought iron I got was not very refined. A result of that is that it has a lot of fractures, cracks, etc... that get worse the more it is worked. So, I have to abandon using this particular wrought iron. Disappointed, I switched back to mild steel.
Times like this often give me a chance to rethink my approach and in some ways I'm glad for this minor setback. As I thought about the verge and foliot a bit it suddenly occurred to me. I don't need to forge weld the pieces, I can braze them. This allows me to create the verge and foliot sperate from each other. Since these are both going to be fairly fine pieces, it should be a workable solution and one that would have been known to a medieval smith.
As I thought about it a bit more, another realization hit me. Creating the verge separately is perfect. It allows me to properly place the two pallets on the verge. The pallets engage a wheel and give the clock it's tick-tock sound. It is a little hard to describe right now but going with this approach should make it very easy to make the matching pieces. Hopefully when I get some pictures of the process, it should be a lot more obvious. In fact, I consider this so obvious that I am more convinced that this would have been the sequence it would have been done in period. First the verge is created, then the crown wheel. Have no idea what a crown wheel is? Check back here in a few months and hopefully it will be done.
So I started to work on the new foliot. I was about a third of the way done before weather drove me indoors. Oh well...
A chronicle of my attempts to create an early clock using only traditional techniques.
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