So the Epicyclic clock made by William Strutt looks a bit like this...
And the gear train looks a bit like this...
The gear train essentially does its 'calculation' in place, instead of stepping 1 by 1 through gear ratios.
I'm sure there is a better way of explaining that.
One of the interresting parts to this gear train is that it uses an inverted gear, or a gear on the inside of a wheel, not on the outside. I have never tried one of these before.
So I thought this a great opportunity to sport the new Grasshopper Escapement with it.
Here are a couple of pics of the design steps.
Here the teeth count is just way too large, so I needed to reduce them.
This is where it was going...The pendulum hinging up so high doesn't work too well for various reasons.
Here's another style, but I wasn't liking it at all.
I finally decided to go with the configuration that was used on Mini. It works well. So I flipped it upside-down and used similar legs to mini, with the added vertical legson the sides. I think they look better.
You can see the 'guts' of it a bit better here. I am to the belief that it is a more efficient gear train, so I am hoping to be able to get a 2 day run out of it at least, but we will see. Mini runs for 30 hours only.
Here is the final design...I think. I'll just need to spend a bit more time looking at it, to make sure it will work.
Holidays are great for getting this sort of thing done. Stay tuned for more updates!
cheers
Rosco
