As a kid I spent ages making things from kits. From the very earliest I enjoyed card models - flat pictures cut, folded and glued to become real objects - fascinating. A cardboard fairytale castle one Christmas, a huge working crane another. The backs of cornflake packets that got cut and folded to make the heads of different dog breeds, then the series of heads of British Kings and Queens - complex, detailed and beautifully designed if perhaps a little macabre - Charles I was among them, I recall. Cornflake packets...
By my early teens card had given way to origami - I enjoyed the precise folding required. Only a bit of paper if it's gone wrong, exquisite if works. With some pain I am now able to fold both the Jackstone and the Kawasaki Rose - that'll do, though.
The birthday book on polyhedra was a huge hit - I made loads from card and have since used various woods, metals and plastics to make the things. Cubic stuff we are used to - we grasp intuitively that a handful of rectangles make a neat solid shape. Wait - though ... trianges do the same thing ... as do pentagons ... something funny going on ...
While at college studying electronics in 1985 a magazine article entitled 'A Cardboard Clock' caught my eye (Wireless World, June 1979) - it described a working clock I could build for myself. A swinging magnet at the end of a pendulum passed over a coil of wire; a little circuit detected it and energised the coil to give the magnet a tiny shove - over and over. It ran for a few months on one battery and it was quite entrancing. The gear wheels were made of card, and it told the time.
In 1988 I came across a book called 'Make your own Paper Clock'. Though it sounded the same this was quite different - a fully working mechanical clock, weight driven and pendulum regulated to be cut from this book - a truly worthy card model. Apart from a knitting needle, some unbent paperclips and a stack of 2p coins for the weight, this clock really was made entirely of card. The pendulum swung, it needed winding daily and it even had the courtesy to say 'tick' regularly. This clock still runs today, though in a somewhat modified form.
At teacher training college in the early 1990's I found a faded photo down the back of an old display cabinet which showed an exquisite mechanical clock made from wood. It had wooden gears and frame, a clean contemporary style and was obviously of the highest quality. I haven't been able to find it since and still have no idea who the maker was. This photograph captured my imagination and directly led to my own wooden clock designs.
I designed my first wooden clock in 1992, as a wedding present for my brother. It was never particularly reliable, sadly. Currently in storage somewhere in Australia, I have some modifications planned that should sort it out. It has similarities to the clocks I make today; in my contrived numbering system it is graced with the name 'Clock Nought'.
I decided I wanted to make wooden clocks for a living in the late 1990's, and started to work on various aspects of clock design with a view to batch production and reliability. In 2003 I reduced to part time teaching and equipped my shed as a small workshop. My goal always was to make wooden-geared weight-driven pendulum clocks but initially I decided to start with the slightly simpler electromechanical clocks based on the Wireless World design - I have returned to this design recently and it is coming along nicely.
The process of designing reliable wooden-geared weight-driven pendulum clocks has been difficult and time consuming. My earlier attempts incorporating recoil escapements were discouraging; when I started to use the more elegant dead-beat escapement (Clock 6, as it happens) I began to see real progress.
I moved into my current workshop mid 2005, since then I have spent most of my time designing, prototyping and working out how to make these clocks.
I currently make weight driven pendulum regulated clocks with dead-beat escapements and a unique arrangement of weights.