I have finished my kinetic sculpture! I am calling it Gulls.

This is a clockwork type sculpture that is weight driven. The mechanism was designed by Art Fenerty. He calls these things "tickers" because of the noise it makes. He was inspired by the work of David C Roy. You can check out a video of it on my YouTube channel here.
The 6 pound rock is pulling the large gear in a CCW direction. It is meshed with a smaller gear behind the large ratchet wheel. The ratchet is held in place by the trigger arm or what Mr Fenerty calls a deadbeat escapement. When the ratchet is released, it moves in a CW direction and engages the large wheel and gulls and sets them in motion in a CCW direction. Eventually the momentum of the wheel stops and because the wheel is unbalanced it starts to turn in a CW direction and trips the deadbeat escapement and the whole process repeats.
The rock drops about 1/4" every time it trips the escapement and it will run for about an hour and 15 minutes with a 45" drop. It hangs above a stairway in my house. It is mesmerizing to watch but it is rather loud when the ratchet is released.
Mr Fenerty has been very generous by making the plans for the mechanism available for free. You have to do some searching on the forum portion of his site to find them. He has a 45 minute video where he explains how it works. It was a fun project and has really gotten me interested in clocks and escapements.

Well, as the title suggests, where has the time gone? It's been over 4 months since I posted anything on my site. So what have I been up to?

December was filled with the usual Christmas busyness. Even though the winter was mild in comparison to some, I found it hard to drag myself out to my unheated garage workshop. So during the month of January I started to look into building a wooden clock. Clocks are so cool, a real functional piece of kinetic art. There are several sites that offer a wide assortment of beautiful clock designs. You can go the plan route or assemble a kit. Some of the clockmakers offer a kinetic sculpture that utilizes a clock escapement mechanism coupled with either a spring or weight driven propulsion to produce movement. It was these types of sculptures that led me into the world of Automata. As I was looking at various sculptures on YouTube, I saw some videos of automata in the side bar and, as they say, the rest is history.

My personality seems to be one of single mindness. I choose a subject and that subject remains the focus of my attention until my focus shifts to another subject. I can feel my focus moving from automata to other kinetic clock type scupltures. How long will I stay focused is unknown. I still have several ideas for automata I would like to pursue. Maybe, just maybe, I will be able to do both. We will see.

The artist that I believe is one of, if not the original, developers of the clockwork type sculptures is David C Roy. I believe he has been doing them for over 25 years and does amazing work. You can view his work from his site here. My wife and I saw examples of his work many years ago, maybe in Traverse City, and they left quite an impression on me.

While working with automata, I came across a man named Art Fenerty. Mr Fenerty is a computer programmer by trade but a woodworker hobbyist. He developed a gear program that he uses for clock design and is available for purchase on his site that can be found here. He too was impressed by the works of David C Roy and set about building his own. He calls his pieces tickers and he has graciously made one available for free plus he has a detailed video on the construction of the ticker.

My wife and I were on vacation for about 5 weeks, returning home in March. Shortly after we returned I set about making my own ticker. After about 3 weeks of experimenting I am nearly done. I have a working piece and I just need to stain and poly it. I will put out a video as soon as I am able.

There are several versions of these sculptures and I will probably look into them next. I also came across a great YouTube channel by Ken Kuo that has annimations of quite a few clock ecapements. The escapement is the heartbeat of a clock and is a beautiful piece of art all in itself. I want to look into making some of these escapements as stand alone pieces. 

And of course, I still would like to make a clock.