Gear Prints (Week of 3/9)

Hello Y'all! This was a mix between working on side projects and the mechanical clock. I've moved onto the next big part of the clock this week, so we'll see how long this step takes me. I don't have else to talk about in the preview, so lets just jump into this strange week!

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Coming in on Monday, I deiced I wanted to fix up my laptop today. A few of the screws on the bottom were missing and I have no idea where they went, so I was just going to replace them with some screws we have in shop. I though that this would be a quick 20 minute side track, but trying to find the right screw size as well as fixing the mounting a bit took a majority of the day. We didn't have the exact screw size within shop but I manged to get 4-40 bolts to work. I was able to get the escapement 3d files started at least by the end of Monday.

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Tuesday was spent putting the spring escapement together and that took all day. The model I found online was simple but it worked for what I needed. It used a lot of M3 bolts with M5 nuts as weights for the balance wheel. Unfortunately, the weights didn't fit at all. It was almost the right size but one side was a bit to small for the weight to fall in. Everything else worked fine but without the proper weights or something else on my end. The escapement wouldn't work by itself, I had to move the gears manually which is against what a mechanical clock is suppose to do. There wasn't any step by step guild on how to put it together so, Tuesday was spent trial and error-ing my way through building it. Wednesday, I worked on the models themselves and building out the rest of the gear train for the clock. I went in a tinkered with the balance wheel model to make it so that the M5 nuts would actually fit this time. When I went to go print it though, I found that that fusion makes the pieces way bigger than they needed to be. Going off the print plate big. I had to match the size of a normal balance wheel with my weight-test one, which turned out to be to small as well. I went through and measured the 3d printed models I had and matched that size in fusion. It took the rest of Wednesday as it was a slow process but after I finished correcting the base escapement sizes, I placed them into the Mechanics file I had in CAD to test how it would fit in the pre-model box that I want everything to go it. It took up a majority of the space, so I now have to up the size of the box, which in turn means up-ing the size of everything in the design CAD file. That's going to take a hot minute so I'm leaving that for next week.

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Thursday as a bit of a side project day. The Business & Marketing Shop have a machine that they recently got but it wasn't working. They asked us to take a look at it and fix it. I wanted a quick break from the clock so I went a saw what the problem was. The motor that turns the print into the machine wasn't working nor was it getting power from the main machine. Though, the main machine was working fine. Mr.Christy and I looked at writing a bit, and it was wired strange. It was built overseas so it kinda made sense that they would have a different method of building things than me. Mr.Christy told me that instead of making it so that the motor gets power form the machine itself, we're just making it so that it gets power form the wall. I had to cut a strip and cut the main wire that you plug into the machine as well as a spare plug-into-wall wire we had in the back. I wasn't able to solder them together that afternoon, so I plan on doing that Friday and, maybe if I have the time, finished the gear train in CAD.

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