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Clock making at the high-end requires a great deal of skill, and I have huge admiration for the people who do it. But all around your house and mine are simple cheap clocks you probably just paid a few dollars for. So why not make your own? It’s fun, creative, relaxing and because the components can be found very cheaply, it can even be quite a profitable hobby.
Now I’m not talking about building six feet tall grandfather clocks here, or Vienna regulators or gilt mantle clocks. They’re beautiful things but the cost of materials is prohibitive and they take months and months to complete. What I’m talking about is clocks you can make in literally a couple of hours and that cost as little as a few dollars. And don’t think that because they’re cheap to make they’re unattractive or of poor quality – far from it. You can make clocks every bit as good looking as those you see in the stores – and because you can use the same type of clock movement, they’ll be just as accurate too.
Here’s an example. Have you ever seen one of those CD clocks? It’s just a clock movement, some hands and a blank CD. You fit the movement through the hole and put the hands on. Price in the shops? $6 - $10. You could buy the parts for $4 or less and you could easily customise the CD by sticking a picture on it.
If you like paper crafts, you just need a design on a strong enough piece of card, make a hole, add a quartz clock movement. If you do clay modelling or pottery you can also use insert clocks which come in a huge range of styles and sizes and just require an appropriate sized hole to fit into.
As a woodworker I have access to tools that will let me create an endless variety of clocks. I love to experiment – and clocks are a great medium for doing that. After all, who can tell you what a clock should look like? So long as it has a method for telling the time, who’s to say how big it has to be? What colour it has to be? The possibilities are, quite literally, endless.
I read somewhere that the average house has at least 4 clocks. Wall clocks, mantle clocks, ones by the bed, ones in the bathroom. Instead of having all those boring plastic and metal digital ones you could replace them with something creative.
So why not give clock making a go? Quartz clock movements are just a few dollars each. The other materials could be as simple as a piece of plywood or any old wooden board and some paint that you might have lying around the place anyway. If you have a scroll saw you can be turning out a huge variety of clocks very quickly – but if not, even a hand saw will do to start. In fact if you find a nice looking piece of board all you really need do is drill a hole for the movement and stick some hands and numbers on!
I spend a lot of time working at a computer so for me there’s nothing better than doing something completely different and making something with my hands. I concentrate but I’m not stressed. I’m relaxed, I’m having fun – and quite often people want to pay me for doing it! I thoroughly recommend it to you.
Dennis Cordy is a writer, wood turner, scrollsawer and clockmaker currently collaborating on a woodwork blog project at http://woodworkwiki.com
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