Clockwork Toy

Prototyping a cnc design with foam board. The final version will be plywood. Don't know why I didn't think of this before!

The prototype has evolved

From foam board prototype to plywood, just had to update the material thickness in the parametric design

I'm updating this clockwork toy that I built about 10 years ago, basically just an escapement mechanism, to add a gear train with a seconds hand

Here's the gear train running on a test jig

Moved the parts over to the new stand

Pretty happy with the result!

Three generations, built over 10 years

The original prototype, the very first test of my laser cut escapement, used a meter long pendulum with a one second tick. The later desktop versions use a shorter pendulum with a 1/2 second tick.

It was 2012 and we had just released an iOS game called Hakenbush that used the Chipmunk physics engine

Playing around with a javascript port of the physics engine I got the idea to try simulating a pendulum clock escapement (running in a web browser)... it worked!

So, of course, I decided to replicate the simulation in real life ;-)

The first parts I cut out of acrylic were too fragile, so I reduced the number of teeth in the escape wheel

The updated simulation