I've noticed something at seems odd about some parts of the gear train. Here is what I expect to see at the interface between gears 5 and 6 (6 = final gear driving the hour hand):
Gear 5 is turning anticlockwise pushing gear 6 clockwise.
But often when I look at this what I see is the following:
The teeth of gear 6 are just resting on those of gear 5 inner, with the wrong faces in contact. I can manually nudge gear 6 anticlockwise so that it is on the correct face of the gear and it will then flop back into this position.
If you look in the background, you can see the same thing is happening between gear 4 and gear 5 outer, and this is likely to be the root cause of what happens between gears 5 and 6. Eventually gear 4 advances enough to engage with the correct side of the teeth on gear 5 outer, and gears 5 and 6 also correct themselves. For a minute or two before it fully engages, you can see gear 5 bounce on each tick.
I am still affected by the stopping problem every few weeks so I'm trying to look for anything that could be anomalous; I've already changed the parts from silk PLA to regular, checked the bearings, polished the arbors and dry-lubricated everything, and increased the weight, and I still get this problem.
If you have any thoughts about this, let me know!
Hi Guys,
I also used dry lubricant and this "sort of helped" but the clock still stopped every now and then.
After applying some lithium grease about a month ago, the pendulum swing amplitude increased immediately and the clock has not stopped yet.
Krys S
Hi David,
That is a good observation. I often wonder if the fancy gear concept is worth the extra effort when designing these clocks. It sometimes takes a few tries to get everything correct. I believe that the gears print better, so I continue designing clocks using them. I don't believe I have released any clocks with "backwards" gears, although my junk pile has a few.
All the gears between the weight shell and the escapement have a steady load pushing the correct faces together. The hour hand gears are unloaded. Your observations are certainly showing the wrong faces touching.
I don't believe they can bind up enough to stall the escapement because the gear 4 pinion is free to rotate clockwise. Then the correct face will rotate the gear 5 wheel and the gear 5 pinion will move to the correct face onto gear 6. It should be easy to check the next time the clock stalls. Gently touch the hour hand gear to see if the power train breaks free.
I have moved to white lithium grease on the pinions instead of dry lube. The only time my clock stops now is if I don't set the beat properly after winding.
Steve