Measuring up.

Now I want this clock that I’m building to be a real, working, actual grandfather clock. So that’s exactly what I’m going to base it off of, and what I’m going to build it into.

This is my parents’ grandfather clock.

parentsclock.jpg

And these are the measurements of their clock:

measurements_parentsclock.jpg

And here are the measurements of my toy clock:

measurements_toyclock.jpg

I took the measurements of the real clock and the toy clock and did a little math on them to see what the differences were:

measurements_major_comparisons.jpg

Between the height and the width that I was shooting for, I had to make some compromises… If I scaled out based on width I’d have a short clock, if I scaled out based on height I’d have a fat clock. I took some liberties on the middle section as I think this is where you have the most room to make un-noticed adjustments, also that’s where it seems the toy clock strays furthest from real world dimensions. The measurements on the top box were all pretty close between the real life clock, and the toy clock, the base measurements were too, so it seems like the toy clock actually was made a little shorter (proportionally) by shortening the middle box, so I’m just going to stretch that back out. In doing so, I’m making my middle box the same dimensions as the one on my parents’ clock, and now all three sections are pretty close in height and width respectively. Without really changing the measurements or proportions of the top box or the base, we’ve managed to line up all three sections just by adding some inches to the vertical on the middle box.

The magic number I came up with in this upscaling was 5.2x. It seems that if I upscaled all (most) of the toy clock’s measurements by 5.2x I came pretty close to the numbers I wanted to use. I want to use the actual height and width of the real clock. Upscaling the face pieces by 5.2 got me the exact sizes I wanted for the top box, which is the most important part. I got 28.5” x 17” vs. my real world 28”x17.5” depending on where you consider the outer limits of the clock box to be.

I’m going to post this writeup that I had done despite disagreeing with some of the numbers at this point (I don’t know what I was thinking with the depth, because those numbers are definitely wrong since there’s some overlap…) Apparently I had a note about the 12” dial that I had erased or cropped out… But aside from those two things, this picture shows what I’m going with on my face measurements at this point (for now):

measurements_face_scaled.jpg

I’m going with an 11.75” dial, that much is locked in for sure. I’ve already built a full scale cardboard demo of what the face is going to look like. These dimensions look pretty solid at the numbers shown here, and the 11.75” dial will do very nicely against that size.