The story over at this persons site about him building a clock entirely out of a rare wood from Australia is just amazing.  The person had never built a clock before.  It sounds like they were pretty good with wood already, but the sort of challenge building a clock presents is far beyond almost anything else you can build out of wood.  The wood chosen, Western Australian Sheoak (as opposed to maleoak?), turned out to very hard.

Now, I don't know anything about clocks (well, physical ones, at least) but one of the pieces, the escapement, looks truly amazing.  The building of it is also quite amazing.  They heated the wood to make it harder.  This removes moisture from the wood and if cooled in the right shape, it becomes harder than it was. 

The claim is that it took 3,000 hours of labor over nearly three years.  That's really amazing to me.  You can build small airplanes from kits in that amount of time.  Granted, part of the time was rebuilding an escapement that broke -- and they took 3 months a piece. 

I've always been fascinated with physical engineering feats like this.  Sure, to some people, the behavior of software is like magic.  To me, though, these sorts of devices are like magic.  Sure, all of the physics makes sense, but the level of patience, extreme levels of precision, and just shear beauty of the gears and wood pieces is really impressive and fascinating to me.  It's one thing to build a precision clock out of metal and buying pieces and putting them together.  It's a completely different thing to build it entirely out of wood and with all pieces self build and measured.

Thanks to the MAKE: blog for the link to this.

Posted by Shane on February 7, 2007 8:55 AM | Permalink