Happy New Year Steve! I have a great idea that I think would be very popular if you could make it a reality. I am a collector of mechanical clocks which is how I found out about your designs. One of my favorite clocks has a moon phase. I was thinking of trying to add a moon phase to your easy build clock, but I'm not sure that I have the design skills. I have included some photos of one of my clocks and how the moon phase mechanism works. All it is, is a pin on a gear that rotates once every 24 hours. The pin bumps into the moon wheel and advances it one tooth every day. There doesn't appear to be a gear that rotates once every 24 hours on the easy build clock, but there is a gear that rotates every 12 hours, so I believe another gear could be added to mesh with that one to fix that.
If you could make this I believe it would be a first for 3d printed clocks and I think it would be awesome. This same pin idea could also be used for a date function. Instead of the wheel having a moon printed on it, it could have numbers from 1 - 31 for the date.
I think this would be an awesome addition that many other people would also enjoy.



Here is the first pass moon phase clock. It was a fun project. The globe and moon files I downloaded had way too much resolution for a 3D printer and they took a few days to clean up. The end result looks pretty good. The moon and globe are each 2.25" across.
The overall size is 23" tall, 9" wide with an 8" dial, and 6" deep. The dial needs to be printed on a 205x205 or larger printer (MK3S, MK4, or Ender 3). The gears are designed to cleanly scale 75% so a smaller version for a Prusa Mini should be possible.
The biggest challenge was designing the 60 tooth gear with a 5 tooth pinion and get it to fit around the other components. Run time is 7.8 days. The moon dial will only have 1 day of error every 965 days.
It needs another pass to fine tune some gear clearances. And the assembly guide still needs to be written, so the release is likely to be at least a month away.
Nick,
Your post got me thinking about moon phases, so I started designing one. All of my wall clocks have the escapement above the dial and I like keeping it visible. The plan is to let the moon dial fille the main dial.
Here is a preliminary prototype. There are no gears yet and I still need to work out the second friction clutch to move the moon without affecting the time. It will need to use 5 and 6 tooth pinions.
Steve
That is a great idea. A moon phase rotates so slowly that it would have a miniscule effect on the runtime.
The easy build clocks might be a good clock to add a moon phase. The traditional location is above the dial. Most of my other clocks have the escapement above the dial, so a moon phase dial would be more difficult.
Maybe the moon phase could be added inside the dial. I have never seen it done this way before, but it seems like an easy place to put one.
The moon phase wants to change every 29.530588853 days. Round this down to 29.5 days. The moon dial has 2 moons, so it rotates once every 59 days. The hour hand rotates once every 12 hours, so the moon dial needs a 118:1 ratio from the hour hand. This could be done with a 59:6 and a 60:5 set of gears. I think a 5 tooth pinion is acceptable here since the pinion is driving. One gear needs a slip fit to allow setting the moon phase without changing the time.
I may try to design a clock with this feature someday.