Member postings for Mark Bus

Hi,

So I'm building a clock and rather than lacquering to prevent tarnishing I've been thinking about gold plating. Has anyone tried to do it him or herself ? And since I don't have the patience to do a mirror polish preparation how would gold plating look or would it even work with, say, a 600 grit abrasive paper finish, then a polish job, and then the plating?

Thanks,

Mark

Hi,

I looked at the bad tooth again and the space is bigger on one side then the other. But it turns out I made another mistake. I made some multi tooth wheel cutters earlier this [2016] year and the first wheels I cut I used my .125 thick cutter . Then I went to cut the 1 Mod. third and center wheels with my .186 thick Thornton cutter. Unfortunately I forgot to adjust the height of the cutter and I cut the teeth too low. Having tried them out on the depthing tool I still think the wheels would work even with all the errors but I know if I use them I'm going to be thinking about it during the whole construction process so I've decided to make new wheels. It"s just easier.

Mark

Hi,

The wheel has the correct number of teeth. The spaces on each side of the narrow tooth are the same. Tooth tip to tooth tip distance is equal. The mistake occurred when i was cutting the first two teeth when I was going back and forth to get the right depth of cut. It dawned on me to mount it on my depthing tool to see if it would work with it's respective lantern pinion. I set it at the correct theoretical spacing. Well , I did that and I didn't notice any problems. I got to thinking that if it was the opposite problem, i.e. a wider tooth, then there might be a jamming problem when the pinion pin was engaging with the tooth but with the narrower tooth things should be OK. The only problem I can think of is that there might be a slight gap or pause in the timekeeping when that narrow tooth comes into engagement with it's pinion?

Mark

Hi,

I cut the center wheel on the clock I'm currently building and one of the teeth is narrower than the rest ; something must have slipped. Its 1 Mod. , the teeth are about 61 thou. except the narrow tooth which is about 46 thou. Is this going to cause any problems with the operation of the clock? The perfectionist in me is screaming in agony while I scourge myself with barbed wire for making the error, but the rational man thinks that it won't matter.

Thanks,

Mark

Hi ,

Look at my thread that I started 1/11/2014 in the the clock forum. I haven't read all of yours just saw the stopping clock video but it looks familiar to my problems.

Mark

Hi,

Me again. The reason he cuts so much off of the cutter is that the partial hole that's left acts as an indexing point on the jig that holds the cutter blank while you cut away the waste. But as I was typing this I got to thinking that maybe you don't need the hole to index from you could just use the perpendicular line from the radial cut and just butt that up against the indexing pin? If you click on Thor's link you will see a picture of the jig.

Mark

Hi,

Thanks to everyone for the replies. I could not remember the proper term for the rake angle. I think I'll cut them radially ; I can always grind in some rake later on.

Thanks,

Mark

Hi Thor,

Dean's are the instructions I'm using to make my cutters I just couldn't figure out if he put any relief on his or not.

Thanks,

Mark

Hi,

Sorry about the appearance of the post.

Mark

Hi,

I'm trying to make some multi-tooth clock wheel cutters and I was wondering if I should provide some " relief " , I guess you would call it , on the front face of each tooth? I've provided some pictures to help explain what I mean.

Thanks,

Mark

Edited By JasonB on 11/07/2016 18:33:14

Hi,

How tight should I set the toothed drive belt on the mini-lathe?

Thanks,

Mark

Hi,

Thanks everyone for the replies. My dividing head uses change gears from the mini-lathe and a homemade hole plate with 22,25, and it was supposed to be, 36 holes.The reason I can't do 108 teeth is because the 36 hole circle on my homemade hole plate somehow got made by me with only 35 holes.. If I had a 54 tooth gear I could do 108 divisions with the 22 hole circle. But that wrong hole circle has always bothered me so I've finally decided to make a new plate with at least the one row of 36 holes.

Mark

Hi,

I want to make the W.R. Smith Skeleton Wall Clock. It calls for a 108 tooth great wheel but with the change gears and hole plate I have with my dividing head I can't make 108 divisions. I got to thinking about it and it seems like the great wheel only transmits the power to the time train so can I just make the great wheel with any tooth count {105, 97,96,113,etc.] that I'm able to do with my dividing gear? I n other word the great wheel tooth count doesn't affect the accuracy of the time keeping?

Thanks,

Mark

Hi,

If I turn the front face back it will expose the extraction groove even more. I guess I'm not that worried;when I tighten the nut by hand it seems to hold fine. It's more like I was just wondering is it another case of " I did everything else perfectly except this one little thing and it ruined the whole part".

Thanks,

Mark

Hi,

I just finished making a milling spindle with an ER 20 collet nose. In the construction articles I've seen in MEW it's been written to make the distance from the extraction groove to the spindle nose 3mm. Having made the spindle nose on my spindle too short I made the distance to the groove 5mm so I wouldn't bore through the bottom of the taper. Is that 5mm distance going to cause any holding problems?

Thanks,

Mark

Hi,

I want to make an auxilliary milling spindle and use ER 11 collets for the tool holding. Is there a way besides the" marking blue to check the fit of the collet in the collet nose taper" method to check the nose taper? I've been practicing cutting the taper and I don't quite trust myself to be able to get it right doing it that way.

Thanks,

Mark

Hi,

What I want is a clock with a less ornate frame and larger gears. The clock uses a .8 Mod cutter for the going train. My most recent idea is to use the 1Mod cutter from the Wilding Brass Alarm Clock,so I don't have to buy another cutter, keep all the gear ratios and tooth counts the same and cut the gears with that . The PCD's would change and so would the OD's . The lantern pinions would be larger too.

All other things being equal, if that's possible, is a clock with larger Module gears as accurate as a clock with smaller M gears ? Does Module size affect accuracy ?

Thanks,

Mark

Hi,

I'm thinking about building the W. R. Smith skeleton wall clock ; it's supposed to be simple to build which is what I want. Of course, however , I have to complicate things. I would really like it to be larger so it would look more impressive . Can clocks be scaled up and how does one do that ? I was thinking that keeping the ratios between the gear sets the same would be the thing to do ?

Thanks,

Mark

Hi,

Why does a clock go tick tock..... rather than tick tick ..... or tock tock.....?

Hi Michael,

I took your advice and started watching the gears mesh. I narrowed my search to the 2nd wheel ? and escape arbor pinion. It appeared as if the 2nd wheel might be slightly out of round. The recoil intensity was consistently weaker on about half of the wheel. While watching the wheels I noticed something on the verge bearing. Previously I had noticed an orange stain where the verge contacted the verge end bearing but I dismisssed it as not being rust because , well, how could there be rust there? I work in a heated area there is no way that rust could get a start. I would just rub the stain off and put everything back together and try to get the clock to run. So when I noticed it this time I said "Why not put a drop of oil on the verge end bearing and see what happens?". Well I did and it immediately started to run properly I then made a new verge using the end of a ballpoint pen for the end of the verge and it looks like that has solved the problem permanently. I put my spear point pallet back on and lowered the pallet closer to designed position and everything works fine.

If there was rust the only thing I can think of is that when I polished the verge bearing surfaces I used water with the wet - dry paper and that's where it started. I also didn't crown the end of the verge very much so maybe there was to much contact area.

As to it's time keeping; I fiddled with the weights the first day after it was running then left it alone this past week. First it slowed down about 14 minutes then it gradually caught up and kept almost perfect time for about two days, then gradually pulled ahead by about 20 minutes until this morning when I stopped it and reset the the time when my other clock caught up. I had thought about making a screw adjustable foliot arm and weights to be able to fine tune the regulation of the time but it almost seems to have a mind of its own about keeping the correct time so maybe I won't do that.

So now I'm happy ; my clock works!!

P.S. Should I oil the pivots?

Thanks,

Mark