The Oakes Family

Book: The starting point for this project is a good guide. Two candidates were found. At first John Wilding’s Large Wheel Skeleton Clock looked to be the favorite. Then I found J.M. Huckabee’s How to Build a Regulator Clock. The Wilding plans call for a lot of sheet 353 alloy brass, over $400 worth just to begin with, ignoring the mistakes that are bound to be made by a beginner. So I’ve decided to stick with the Huckabee regulator.

Patterns: The regulator plans call for three 1/8″ aluminum plates. I found a huge sheet and several smaller pieces at a scrap dealer in town for just a few dollars. I downloaded DeltaCAD and redrew the plans for the plates as the plans in the book were out of scale and inaccurate. There were also a few mistakes given in dimensions and some were missing too. I printed them out on a standard inkjet and the resulting patterns were spray mounted onto the aluminum sheets. (2 hours)

Sawing: I bought a jewellers saw on Ebay along with a pack 144 fine blades. After a few snapped blades and some research, I found that I had the blades much too loose and after tightening it worked much better. Sawing out the plates is a slow process and takes a lot of work but it is good to see actual progress started. (1 hour)

I have become less than impressed by the cheap saw - it doesn’t seem to clamp the blades very tightly and seeing the vast amount of sawing that needs to be done on this and future clocks, I sought out better quality tools and chose a couple of German / Swiss made versions instead of the Chinese. Hopefully they will propel me into sawing heaven when they arrive and continue to remind me that quality is always a good choice.

New saws: The new Grobert saws have arrived - and despite being only a few dollars more, they are a world apart from the Chinese junk. They tighten easily by hand, without tools, and grip tennaciously. I did twice as much in half the time with only a couple of broken blades - mainly operator error. The Sawzall made very quick work of slicing the raw sheet to a workable size, and the four inch throat saw was more than sufficient for the fine sawing.

Within an hour or two, the rear plate was cut. Just two more plates to go and then I can start drilling, pinning, filing and making them all uniform and perfect. (2 hours)

Total: 5 hours + $2