Arts & Crafts Clock
I found this set of plans online, and they say woodstore.net
on them, but the checkout
process seems
to take place through woodcraft.
The case is all white oak, and is supposed to be quarter sawn,
but I could only find plain sawn,
and rift sawn oak here locally. The use of different wood does show
in a couple of places, but
hopefully it's not real noticeable.
This clock was not very hard to construct, even with a whole
bunch of small mortice and tenon
joints for the front face. The dial is a solid sheet of copper, which is
darkened to make it appear
that
it has some age to it. I think that I did over do the aging process
though, because once it was all
done, I thought the dial was a little dark.
I'm not sure that I would recommend this clock to anybody
though, and here's the why: the plans call
for a movement and dial from schlabaugh & sons, but as usual, when you go there,
the parts are not
listed on their website. So, I eventually gave up and got a copper sheet
from another source, and
got a Seiko dual chime movement (with pendulum) to put in it. I think it
would be a lot easier on the
builder
if the plans gave you the specs for the movement and dial, rather than the
schlabaugh item
number,
because then it forces you to reverse engineer what is actually needed.
The Seiko movement
is really
great though, i would recommend that to anyone.
Getting a patina in the copper sheet is a bit of a trick.
I tried 2 different methods which did not
work, and
then finally bought some photographic universal fixer solution (B&H photo, NYC),
which did the job nicely.
My real objection to the design of this clock though, is that
it is supposed to have a pane of glass
just behind
the face frame, but the plans tell you to keep it in there with a bead of
silicone caulking.
Really? After
making all these mortices and stuff, you're just going to glue the glass in?
The bigger reason that I did not install the glass though, is
to get access to the clock hands. If you built it
exactly to the plan, when daylight savings time came, etc, you would have to
take the back off the clock
and slide the clockworks shelf out to adjust the hands each time. You
would also have to make sure that
the pendulum kept swinging while you screwed the back on too. But anyway,
those were my thoughts,
and
of course, yours may be different. I think a simple hole in the back panel
would be handy, so you
could just reach in with your finger and adjust the clock hands.
This set of plans does give you some real good ideas on a
methodology to construct
all the little
wood accent plugs which often populate arts and crafts type designs.
They
have
you build a little jig to and the diamonds on the top of the plugs, and then use
a dado
blade setup to cut the tenons. You just have to be sure that you have a
good dado set,
because the parts are to small to allow any kind of tearout on those tiny tenons.