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The Suprematist Time Keeping Machine
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I made this clock as a present for my younger son to decorate his new home.
The idea of this clock started during a visit to the National Art Gallery in Washington, DC. In the modern art section, there is a sculpture created in 1915 by the French artist Ivan Puni (1894-1956). Puni was an artist following the
Suprematist art movement, very popular in Rusia. Below the pictures that I took at the gallery:
Suprematist Construction Montage
By Ivan Puni (1915-1916)
When I saw the sculpture, the idea of a clock came right away. The black circle will long rectangle as the second's hand, the long rectangle in the red square the minute's hand and long polygon on the black triangle as the hour's hand. The artist used cardboard, paper, and some scrap metals to make the sculpture, some of the paint is fade out by the time. The sculpture is protected with a transparent plastic cover to protect it.
My clock is a replica in the size and shapes of the original sculpture, but I used some other materials for durability and modern construction techniques. I used for the back place 1/4" plywood and dark Danish Oil stain. There is another inverter L shape piece that I think is some kind of stone in the original art, I used MDF with a smoke gray paint. For the square, triangle, minute's, and the hour's hands and circle, I used 1/8" plywood. The second's hand is aluminum.
I built the large cone shape with a brass sheet, the smaller cone shape with a sheet of galvanized steel, and the corrugated panel with an aluminum sheet.
I used for all the wheels, except the motor pinion 1/4" and 3/8" Premium Baltic Birch Plywood B/BB Grade.
The clock drive is a stepper motor controlled by an Arduino Nano with an RTC (real-time clock) and a micro-stepping stepper motor drive board. The stepper motors are noisy when running at low speed, even with micro-stepping, so I isolated the motor with rubber spacers and also made a rubber pinion to drive the clock.
All the wheel shafts are 1/4" brass, and all are installed with sealed roller bearings.
Creating the Model:
First things, first! And the first thing is the model, and as usual, I used Fusion 360 to create the 3D model of the clock.
I found the dimensions information on the National Gallery website and started my model with a canvas image scaled at the real size. Below you can see an animation of the transition from the canvas picture to the model:
Many hours of work resulted in a model almost identical to the original. There is some small modification in the position of the hour's hand to avoid collision with the minute's hand and to reference a real-time relation between the hours, the minutes, and the seconds. The artist made the sculpture in a way that it almost shows a real hour!
