Thursday, May 9, 2013

Strutt Epicyclic..."Epi"

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



2 comments:

  1. Love your designs, especially the concept of shelf clocks, wall space is at a premium especially when the other half and kids don't share the love of ticking wood!
    Do you have any plans to sell on dxf's of your designs?
    Thanks for your inspiration.

    Chris

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    1. Hello Chris,
      Thankyou for your kind words. I have not made any DXF's for sale. What are you looking for. I might be able to accommodate you, time permitting.
      You can email me if you like, at r.batten@optusnet.com.au.
      cheers
      rosco

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