Weston-McEwen students gear up for clock project

What started out as a fascination with one tooth of a gear and a snapshot in a magazine turned into a year-long project for two Weston-McEwen High School students intrigued by the idea of building a grandfather clock completely from wood.

Sean Calvert and James Albert began their odyssey into clockmaking in April 1993, just after finishing a unit on gear construction in Dave Lange’s Technology class at Weston-McEwen. The class allowed students to investigate everything from traditional carpentry to computer animation to architecture. Calvert and Albert, both juniors, happened upon a magazine article that featured an entirely wooden clock, complete with dozens of gears, pendulum and a boxed-in frame. Intrigued, they decided to build their own clock from scratch.

“You don’t realize how complex a clock is until you start building it,” said Calvert. “We though it would take three months.”

The magazine article had given them only the outside diameter of each gear and the number of teeth. They plugged those figures into 10 different formulas to figure out the mechanical dimensions of each gear — no sweat for two guys enrolled in the highest math class at the school, math analysis. Calvert and Albert used AutoCAD to design the gears, then translated the designs to MasterCam to make the final adjustments.

Then a computerized numerical control milling machine was used to cut out each gear — in halves, because the machine wasn’t wide enough to cut the gears in one piece. Through trial and error, and many botched attempts, the duo soldiered on using their most important tool of all — seamless teamwork.

“They had to be problem solvers every day,” Lange said.

The most difficult, and most critical, gear was the escape wheel, which controls the weights and pendulum and gives the tick-tock to the clock. Albert wrestled for days with a scale and protractor to hand-design the spiky teeth. And the pair found that plywood made for “fuzzy” gears, so a three-tiered, cross-grained cherry and walnut sandwich was created for the precise edges they needed.

More than a year after that original article piqued their interest, Calvert and Albert were scrambling to finish the last pieces of the clock in April of 1994 before their senior year ticked away. Calvert, the more analytical of the pair, studied the pieces to find and fix any problems. Albert, who planned a career in architecture, was carving a rounded gear frame to house the inner workings. Both vowed to continue working on the clock through the summer, hoping to finish the project before they went their separate ways to college.

But there would be no arguments over who got to keep the final product: the team made duplicates of each part, so each would go home with a clock.

Weston-McEwen high school seniors Sean Calvert (left) and James Albert (right) hold the gears that form the foundation for the wooden grandfather clock they spent a year crafting from wood after a technology class with teacher Dave Lange (center) in 1993. (EO file photo)