Hi Folks,
I've just found your forum and don't really know how I've missed it for so long. I've been messing about with wooden gears for the last decade or so and probably could have learned a lot by having a browse here once in a while.
Anyhow, this might be a bit left field compared to the rest of the posts here, but I've finally, after several years of planning, research and generally putting it off, gotten around to designing and building a wood geared version of the Antikythera Mechanism. Not strictly speaking a clock, but it most certainly can be used to measure the passage of time - just over a longer period than a normal clock...
For those not familiar with it, it's the 2100 year old gear driven shoe box sized machine that was discovered in very bad condition within a shipwreck off Greece in 1900. Since that time researchers have discovered that it could predict planetary movements (including retrograde motion where the planets appear to move backwards in the sky), eclipses, passage of time, moon phases, and all with an accuracy that in some cases has less than a 1° error over a period of 500 years... and it pre-dates the first gear driven clock by over 1000 years. In other words, it's pretty darned clever.
Latest research has put the gear count inside the machine at something in the region of sixty, and it would have predicted the motions of all the planets out to Saturn with a really neat and elegant system of gear trains.
It is also more or less unique in that it represents what can be seen looking out from Earth - so Earth itself is not featured on the machine - but in a lot of ways it makes it a much more useful device than a standard orrery, and way more complicated...
So, my plan is to build a version of this incredible machine and incorporate all the latest thinking on the gear trains which nobody has yet done in a physical machine, all the machines so far built are modeled on earlier thinking. And I'm going to do it all with hand cut wooden gearing - not a laser or CNC machine in sight...
The machine will end up about one and a half times bigger than the original, but it's still quite small considering what it will eventually do.
What could possibly go wrong?!
I've already made a really good start and got pretty much all the gearing cut and trial fitted to the main set of frames. It doesn't yet run, although all the gear pairs have been test run successfully within the frames, the assembly in the photo was just to see if it all fitted together as it should - and it did! What you see represents about a year of work I guess...
There is still lots to do, but I think that I'm definately heading in the right direction.
I'll try and keep you all posted as I progress.

