Friday, January 20, 2012

Independently controlled clock hands

Another post where the pictures are not as awesome as I would like (the next three or four might be like this) but the project was cool so I'm posting it anyway. 
This clock needed to have two independently controlled hands so that the time could be reset by the actor every few minutes (when he would pop through the face as a Cuckoo clock bird.
For the actor, we marked each time on the back and gave him an exact landing point for the wire he was moving (since he had no visual of the front of the clock).
The minute hand was attached to a 2" copper tube. On the front side this simply required a bit of glue, and a bit of gaff tape, to hold the foam-core clock hand to the tube. On the back side, to affix the wire the the actor manipulated to the tube, I needed to use JB weld (if you haven't used it before, JB weld is a two part adhesive designed specifically for attaching metals, it is available at most hardware stores and is amazing).

Once the hour hand was set, the minute hand was easy. I attached the hand on the front directly to my wire, fed the wire through the copper tube, and bent it over in the back to make it easy to turn.
While the back of the clock looks pretty silly when the hands started moving on the front of the clock it looked pretty magical. 

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