ABONGDavid Mechanical Clock Kit - 3D Wood Puzzle Model - DIY Wooden Gear Wall Clock With Pendulum - No Batteries Required, Runs for 36 Hours on Single Wind

The media could not be loaded. ABONG DAVID MECHANICAL WOOD CLOCKDIFFICULTY LEVEL:4/5, Expert LevelSUMMARY:This is a good clock kit for those that have already built several wood clocks and is looking for a challenge or is a skilled model maker. This clock requires a modest amount of tools including a small razor saw, a hobby knife, glue, a drill and metric drill bits and several sheets of sandpaper to complete successfully. Additionally, you must have a fair amount of patience, the ability to pay attention to small details and the ability to problem solve. With the leverage of four driven gears, this clock requires paying utmost attention to reducing friction between all moving parts for it to work correctly.PROS:1. Carbon fiber axles that are strong and sized consistently.2. Ball bearings help to reduce friction.3. Easy to set and read hands.4. A beautiful clock with intriguing complication.5. Keeps accurate time once adjusted and broken in.CONS:1. No written instructions included. Must download instructions online.2. Requires much sanding of the gears and cogs to allow them to fit with as little friction as possible. The gears have small teeth and will require a lot of patience to sand each one.3. Need to acquire tools if you don't have them already.4. The carbon fiber axles need to be cut to size. The carbon fiber axles can splinter and be a hazard. The carbon fiber dust is also a hazard that needs to be controlled.5. Must be able to problem solve.6. Need to acquire material for the drive weight.7. The rewinding mechanism is awkward.BUILD TIPS:1. I used a good hobby quality cyanoacrylate (superglue) adhesive in thin and medium viscosity with a fine applicator tip throughout the build to avoid waiting for a wood glue to set. If you haven't used CA glue before, practice on some scrap bits to judge how long it takes to set.2. I hardened all the gear teeth with a drop of thin CA and then sanded each tooth until almost all the brown resin from the laser cutting process was removed. I did this before I started assembling the gear sets. This takes a fair amount of time. Hardening the teeth reduces friction and will reduce wear on the teeth.3. I used wax from a candle on all contact points between gears and pallets and burnished the wax in with my fingernail until I could feel no ridges on the sanded parts.4. I used the wooden washers to locate the gears on the axles but did not glue them in place until AFTER the clock had been fully assembled. This allowed the gears to be slid on the axle shafts to allow proper clearance between gears. I also used thin stainless steel washers as shims to fine tune the spacing between the gear faces and between the structural pieces. Only after I was satisfied with the gear spacing did I glue the washers in place on the axles to fix the gear positions. Make sure all gears spin as freely as possible and don't wobble. Also check to ensure there is no interference between contacting gear teeth. A little clearance is ok.5. I triple checked to make sure all axles were perpendicular to the baseplate frame and parallel to each other. I found that the structural faceplate frame of my clock kit had shrunk slightly and warped. As a result, the bearing holes in the bottom and top frames did not match and were off by more than 1 mm laterally on the outside gears. As a result, the axles would bind in the bearings as they were at an angle and that there was a severe interference fit between the gears. I clearanced the out-of-position holes in the faceplate and relocated the bearings so that the axles would be all perpendicular to the frames and parallel to each other. A bit of a pain but readily solvable.6. Take care to reduce friction wherever possible. I was able to get my clock running as soon as I hung the drive weight filled with 5 pounds of lead. With some fine tuning and break-in, my clock currently ticks reliably with just over 2-1/8 pounds of weight.7. Overall, it took me about 50 hours to build this clock.RATING: Five Stars.This was a challenging but satisfying build. While there were some issues that needed to be overcome, you would expect this with an expert level kit - even if it is precision cut with a laser - because of the nature of wood. With four large driven gears, this clock is a challenge to build successfully as the escapement is highly leveraged and any friction will stall the mechanism. If you take your time to build accurately, you will be rewarded with a beautiful clock without having to cut your own gears and for a fraction of what a custom wood skeleton clock would cost.

I got this kit for my husband as a Christmas gift. He loved building it and the clock looks even better in person than in the pictures!I did read a lot of the negative reviews however, and I have to say that this kit is not for you if you do not have a lot of patience and do not enjoy tinkering. This is not the kind of thing that you are going to put together and it will just work. After all this is a working clock with lots of intricate parts. It probably took twice as long to tweak it and get to run perfectly than to put it together in the first place.But if you are patient and don't mind taking it apart a dozen times to make teeny, tiny adjustments, this is a fun project and a very nice looking clock!

A new filter rod is needed to complete the clock

This is a beautiful clock. I gave this to my son as a Christmas gift. He did a really good job putting it together without much help. However, there were some design problems that kept if from becoming functional. This is primarily in the gears/shafts/bearings of the clock.1) The holes that the bearing seat in are slightly to big. The bearing do not sit tightly in the space provided, and the outer race of the bearing will turn freely in the hole.2) Shaft sizes are inconsistent. The shafts provided will fit tight in some bearings and will fall straight through in others. This also creates a problem for the gears, as they will then not stay in the position within the clock that they need to stay in order to not rub on each other. Why the chose a cheap plastic shaft I have no idea. For the $$ it takes to purchase this, these problems could have been easily overcome by a quality set of precut length brass shafts for minimal cost.3) Gears: There is some warp in some of these gears that just won't come out, despite all attempts to do so. I actually bought a 2nd kit in the hope that a different set of shafts/gears would allow this to be entered as a 4-H project by my son in the fair. He spent hours working and assembling this clock. If there were more depth in the design, so that the gears could be spaced out more, this problem could be fixed. However, without more depth the gears will rub.This was not the first clock that my son put together, but certainly the most difficult. The problems with the bearings/gears/shafts just creates to much friction for the clock to be able to run. When the inner and outer races of bearings are so loose that the bearing spins, or the shaft doesn't engage, it creates more friction than a properly seated bearing. Gears rubbing and sliding positions also create more friction than the weight can overcome.Sorely dissapointed in the engineering of this design.