Building the “Toucan” wooden clock Part 1

I will be posting the advances and the leanings while working in this project. I am working as much and as fast as I can in this project because very soon I will start a new contract (life is not always hobbies )and I will be traveling a so the available time to play in my garage will be dramatically reduced …

First step was to finish all the finish the drawings in CAD, second step is to post-process each part to generate the G code for the CNC. this means also to select the tooling and the material.

Wood (good wood) is not easy to find. For the wheels and internal components   I will use Birch ply-wood for the wheels and pinions and also for the clock arrows but for the frame, the base and  dial I wanted good wood. and good and nice  wood is expensive and not easy to find .

The most difficult part from the machining point of view is the dial ring because I changed the design and instead of cutting a disc of wood and then glue the numbers in wanted to carve the wood to form the numbers. I also modified my original design and now the numbers will be Roman style and

In the internal ring  face there will be inserts of brass rods marking the hours so I decided to start from the dial ring.

The main problem was to find a good wood for the dial, The best wood I could find for this was in Michaels and is a cross cut of bass wood that is about 11” diameter (Basswood Country Round® – Large) , perfect for the size of the dial ring. This is a very good wood for carving that is exactly what I planed.

The thickness needed for the design is 3/8”plus 1/8th for the numbers so this is  is 1/2”. the wood was a little bit less than 3/4” (.605”) so I had to mill it down to 1/2”.

After this cut the center part and make a rough milling of the numbers and the front face:

Next step was to make a finish milling of the face. This  creates a  surface with almost no irregularities and this will reduce to a minimum the work with sand paper for stain and finishing:

Finally the finish mill of the numbers the internal ring face and cut the dial from the main wood:

Total machining time was about 5 hours as I used very low feed rates and small step advances to avoid stressing the wood and obtain a good finish.

 

And this is the final results! now the dial ring is ready for a nice wood finishing.