After this step, we’ve got a functioning, time telling clock!
I’d picked up a cheap little quartz hobby clock kit from Hobby Lobby as I was too impatient to wait for one to be shipped. It’s just a little $5 quartz movement with some matching hands. I wanted some nice ornate hands for this thing as a nice clock should have. I decided to take some artistic license here and not go with the fingers that are used as hands on the actual clock, I just think that’d look silly. I do think a nice set of gothic ornate hands would look right at home though to give it that nice powerful look, and they had these with the movements. The hands could maybe stand to be a little bit longer…. I’ll continue my search for the perfect length hands in the meantime. I may try to find something a little higher quality at some point. Well, now this thing is a real clock, and that tick is so satisfying. (Now onto the chimes!)
Unfortunately the design of the hands gets a little bit lost in the inner design of the clock, especially black hands over the black design. So I decided to paint them. I went with a nice solid purple to match the color themes of the mansion and hit it with a nice triple gloss spray to make it really pop. I love the color and the shine, but… I’m wondering if a nice bright red or crimson might work a little bit better…? More of a blood red color with the same shine coat may stand apart from the designs in the dial a little bit better… I think the hands were only a couple bucks so I might just grab another set and paint those separately so I can compare and keep whichever works best.
The original idea which was sadly thrown out was to put a real grandfather clock movement in it. There’s just something so satisfying about a real solid grandfather clock movement, they’re just so nice with that tick, the chimes, the sound of the chains when you wind them… but that price tag. What I’d really LOVE to do some day is find a way to control the hands with a Raspberry Pi (since that’s what will be driving other parts of this clock anyway). Set it up to stay synced with NTP so it’ll always be accurate. Surprisingly to me, there are very few Pi controlled analog clock projects out there, tons of digital, but it looks like analog may be a lot tougher. So for now, that moves to the after-build list of future upgrades. Quartz will do for the time being!