Scaling clock plans?

I have just purchased Making Wooden Clocks & Gears book from Amazon to gain the experience with a view of designing my own. I will be making it on my CNC machine using Vcarve Pro and a superb little program called Gear Generator. The first clocks from the book I will make are the Compact Gear Clock and the Flying Pendulum Clock. Is anyone familiar with these designs and if so can anyone tell me if the clocks will still effectively work if I reduce the scale by 50%? The theory works but as previous designing has taught me practicality doesn't always prevail.
[COLOR=rgba(17, 17, 17, 0.6)]




REPLY


[/COLOR]

Welcome to the forum.

You may already know this, but mechanical clocks are conceptually very simple. They have a power source that turns a gear train, and an escapement that slows the gear train down to a fixed speed.

You can linearly scale the gear train and it will still operate the same. However, the period of a pendulum is proportional to its length. Scaling it to 50% of the original size would make it beat around 40% faster. You can either keep the pendulum length constant and scale everything else, or you could scale the pendulum to 50% and adjust the gear ratios to account for the difference.

The flying pendulum is a different mechanism for regulating the time. They are extremely interesting to watch, but not very accurate. I am guessing that most of the beat time is related to how many times the ball wraps around the pegs. Maybe they can be scaled in size with the same number of wraps to keep the time constant. It might be easier to keep the same size flying ball as the plans and scale everything else. Please report back any results if you do some experimentation in this area.