Although I tend to design and build things frequently (I’m a mechanical engineer), it’s been years since I worked on anything legitimately horological. The following projects are from a long time ago (pre 1997), all done without any CAD or CNC.
Tourbillon, built sometime when I was in high school, out of parts from an old Westclox alarm clock. Still runs great.
My first perpetual calendar- clunky but functional.
My second perpetual calendar incorporated all sorts of learnings from the first one. The entire mechanism is driven by a single lever and pawl. The pawl (i.e., bent piece of wire near the bottom of the photo) does several things at once:
- drives the day wheel forward at least one tooth every 24 hrs.
- drives the month wheel forward one tooth at the end of every month.
- catches a single long tooth on the day wheel to advance it extra days at the end of a short month.
The next image shows perpetual calendar work mounted into an oversized DOXA pocket watch. History is everywhere- I recently learned that this particular watch was pilfered from a town in Germany by an American soldier during WWII! This whole project was riddled with problems, and landed beyond my ability (at the time) to make small parts. Some of the gears turned out okay, however the screws are massive because I couldn’t figure out how to tap small holes. I tried to make my own small taps on a screw cutting lathe, however I didn’t heat treat them properly and they crumbled when I tried to use them. This was in 1996, before I knew about the internet… Thankfully I can now look all this stuff up, and learn how to do it right.
Making A Perpetual Calendar Watch 