David Clock

ABONG DAVID MECHANICAL WOOD CLOCK DIFFICULTY LEVEL: 4/5, Expert Level SUMMARY: This is a good clock kit for those that have already built several wood clocks and is looking for a challenge or is a skilled model maker. This clock requires a modest amount of tools including a small razor saw, a hobby knife, glue, a drill and metric drill bits and several sheets of sandpaper to complete successfully. Additionally, you must have a fair amount of patience, the ability to pay attention to small details and the ability to problem solve. With the leverage of four driven gears, this clock requires paying utmost attention to reducing friction between all moving parts for it to work correctly. PROS: 1. Carbon fiber axles that are strong and sized consistently. 2. Ball bearings help to reduce friction. 3. Easy to set and read hands. 4. A beautiful clock with intriguing complication. 5. Keeps accurate time once adjusted and broken in. CONS: 1. No written instructions included. Must download instructions online. 2. Requires much sanding of the gears and cogs to allow them to fit with as little friction as possible. The gears have small teeth and will require a lot of patience to sand each one. 3. Need to acquire tools if you don't have them already. 4. The carbon fiber axles need to be cut to size. The carbon fiber axles can splinter and be a hazard. The carbon fiber dust is also a hazard that needs to be controlled. 5. Must be able to problem solve. 6. Need to acquire material for the drive weight. 7. The rewinding mechanism is awkward. BUILD TIPS: 1. I used a good hobby quality cyanoacrylate (superglue) adhesive in thin and medium viscosity with a fine applicator tip throughout the build to avoid waiting for a wood glue to set. If you haven't used CA glue before, practice on some scrap bits to judge how long it takes to set. 2. I hardened all the gear teeth with a drop of thin CA and then sanded each tooth until almost all the brown resin from the laser cutting process was removed. I did this before I started assembling the gear sets. This takes a fair amount of time. Hardening the teeth reduces friction and will reduce wear on the teeth. 3. I used wax from a candle on all contact points between gears and pallets and burnished the wax in with my fingernail until I could feel no ridges on the sanded parts. 4. I used the wooden washers to locate the gears on the axles but did not glue them in place until AFTER the clock had been fully assembled. This allowed the gears to be slid on the axle shafts to allow proper clearance between gears. I also used thin stainless steel washers as shims to fine tune the spacing between the gear faces and between the structural pieces. Only after I was satisfied with the gear spacing did I glue the washers in place on the axles to fix the gear positions. Make sure all gears spin as freely as possible and don't wobble. Also check to ensure there is no interference between contacting gear teeth. A little clearance is ok. 5. I triple checked to make sure all axles were perpendicular to the baseplate frame and parallel to each other. I found that the structural faceplate frame of my clock kit had shrunk slightly and warped. As a result, the bearing holes in the bottom and top frames did not match and were off by more than 1 mm laterally on the outside gears. As a result, the axles would bind in the bearings as they were at an angle and that there was a severe interference fit between the gears. I clearanced the out-of-position holes in the faceplate and relocated the bearings so that the axles would be all perpendicular to the frames and parallel to each other. A bit of a pain but readily solvable. 6. Take care to reduce friction wherever possible. I was able to get my clock running as soon as I hung the drive weight filled with 5 pounds of lead. With some fine tuning and break-in, my clock currently ticks reliably with just over 2-1/8 pounds of weight. 7. Overall, it took me about 50 hours to build this clock. RATING: Five Stars. This was a challenging but satisfying build. While there were some issues that needed to be overcome, you would expect this with an expert level kit - even if it is precision cut with a laser - because of the nature of wood. With four large driven gears, this clock is a challenge to build successfully as the escapement is highly leveraged and any friction will stall the mechanism. If you take your time to build accurately, you will be rewarded with a beautiful clock without having to cut your own gears and for a fraction of what a custom wood skeleton clock would cost.

It was a fun build. It filled a lot of time (which is what I was looking for). Clock works after a lot of critiquing. The problem I had was with the instructions. They have you glue things that need adjusting after you partially assemble. There was some errors in the orientation of the gears. Also you will need some tools that they do not tell you, but nothing the average garage does not have. If you buy it my recommendation is to straighten gears before beginning stages of instructions, and do not glue the gears until you are at the point of fine tuning the gear rotations ( instruction say to glue in the beginning). Other than that good quality and fun to build.

I got this kit for my husband as a Christmas gift. He loved building it and the clock looks even better in person than in the pictures! I did read a lot of the negative reviews however, and I have to say that this kit is not for you if you do not have a lot of patience and do not enjoy tinkering. This is not the kind of thing that you are going to put together and it will just work. After all this is a working clock with lots of intricate parts. It probably took twice as long to tweak it and get to run perfectly than to put it together in the first place. But if you are patient and don't mind taking it apart a dozen times to make teeny, tiny adjustments, this is a fun project and a very nice looking clock!

This is a beautiful clock. I gave this to my son as a Christmas gift. He did a really good job putting it together without much help. However, there were some design problems that kept if from becoming functional. This is primarily in the gears/shafts/bearings of the clock. 1) The holes that the bearing seat in are slightly to big. The bearing do not sit tightly in the space provided, and the outer race of the bearing will turn freely in the hole. 2) Shaft sizes are inconsistent. The shafts provided will fit tight in some bearings and will fall straight through in others. This also creates a problem for the gears, as they will then not stay in the position within the clock that they need to stay in order to not rub on each other. Why the chose a cheap plastic shaft I have no idea. For the $$ it takes to purchase this, these problems could have been easily overcome by a quality set of precut length brass shafts for minimal cost. 3) Gears: There is some warp in some of these gears that just won't come out, despite all attempts to do so. I actually bought a 2nd kit in the hope that a different set of shafts/gears would allow this to be entered as a 4-H project by my son in the fair. He spent hours working and assembling this clock. If there were more depth in the design, so that the gears could be spaced out more, this problem could be fixed. However, without more depth the gears will rub. This was not the first clock that my son put together, but certainly the most difficult. The problems with the bearings/gears/shafts just creates to much friction for the clock to be able to run. When the inner and outer races of bearings are so loose that the bearing spins, or the shaft doesn't engage, it creates more friction than a properly seated bearing. Gears rubbing and sliding positions also create more friction than the weight can overcome. Sorely dissapointed in the engineering of this design.

I knew from another review that this would not be an easy build. To start: If you are not a highly experienced woodworker and model builder and do not have a complete shop at your disposal, DO NOT buy this kit, you will end up throwing it against the wall. I have all of the above and it looks like I will get mine to work just fine, it is currently going through the shop trials. I had to modify just about every single part, practically NOTHING fitted out of the box. Also, since the plywood sheets are not shrink wrapped into plastic, but are shipped loosely in a cardboard box, they arrive slightly warped. And if you have 5 inch diameter wheels that are thinner than an eighth of an inch and allow for less the a 16th of an inch of clearance in the movement, any warping of ANY degree is just about fatal. So DO NOT glue the axle spacers into place as the instructions tell you, your clock will be doomed if you do. Wait until the final assembly and move the wheels slightly on the axles as needed to prevent them from touching. Also, there is no precise instruction on how much the counterweight must weigh. The instructions just tell you to fell it with BBs. What kind of BBs, steel, plastic, light weight plastic, heavy weight plastic? They leave you guessing on your own. I recommend 2mm lead shot pellets and start with 700 to 800 grams. Again, this is just the tip of the iceberg, do not get involved with this kit if you aren't a seasoned professional.

This is the second kit that I have built from Abong. Both kits have some of the same problems. One of the biggest is the small wooden dowels. They are much too small for the holes that they go into. I had to use some metal stock that fit the holes. You can use almost anything that fits since there is no real pressure on the dowels once everything is glued up. I used some duplex nails that I had on hand, they are about 0.130" or approximately 1/8". This kit also had warped gears and other parts. This is not a deal breaker. I used a large thick board that completely covered the wood sheets. I added a few heavy concrete blocks and let the wood set for a few days. This gave me almost flat gears and other parts. You will want to sand all the parts before you remove them from the sheets they are in. I used a quarter sheet sander with 220 grit to remove all the laser cutting stains. This keeps the parts from getting rounded edges as they would if you sanded them with out the protection of the wood they are in. So, this kit takes time and patience to complete. All in all, it took about 45 to 60 hours to complete this kit into a running clock. Yes, the kit will run and it will keep time if you take the time to assemble it well. If you are planning on just a few hours to assemble this clock you may want to avoid this kit and the frustration. The outside of the box says the difficulty is at an "Expert Level", but if they fixed some of the problems this kit its really more of an intermediate level of difficulty, please read on. I used as little glue as possible and zero wood glue as this tends warp the wood with its water content. I used only 15 minute Epoxy and Super Thin Cyanoacrylate (super glue), to assemble the clock. I also had to make a new hub for the escapement gear as it would not run true with the wood hub parts provided (oversized holes in the parts, equals, lots of wobble). Other shafts needed to have adapters and bushings made so they would run true on the shafts and reduce the slop between the gears. All the small pieces need to be hardened with thin super glue before removing them from the sheets. If you don't you will be needing to make some replacement parts and gears as I did. The small parts that are deeply engraved will give you the most issues. I use small razor saw, this is made for making very fine cuts in delicate wood parts. Overall the laser cutting is of good quality on the larger items in this kit but as stated before, the small holes were way oversized for the shafts (dowels) provided. I needed to use a drop of the very thin super glue to harden the ends of all the gear teeth. Applying a drop in each tooth and letting it soak in and harden overnight worked very well. The gears are cut out of thin plywood and are very, very brittle and chip easily. This is a huge problem with the escapement gear as the teeth are very fine and need to keep there specific shapes. Once the escapement gear teeth are well hardened they can be smoothed up so they engage and disengage smoothly. If this is not done the pendulum will pick up a vibration and loose the most of the power from the dropping weight. I also needed extra mass on the pendulum and made a new brass pendulum end weight (about 3 grams). I had to do this to mine since it was running to fast. Once done, the clock MUST be hung so that it's dead plum and level. Since the clock only has one mounting screw I made a “V” block to hold the bottom of the clock plum. So with enough time and effort this is a nice clock, that runs well, keeps okay time and makes a quick "Tic Toc" sound. I wish the makers of this kit would open up one of there clock kits and look at the obvious problems that they are shipping out the door, maybe, just maybe they would fix the kit. If the manufacturer would fix these problems, this would be a fantastic little kit clock that would work well when you follow the provided instructions. And by the way, the provided instructions are okay, better than most. But there is ZERO about trouble shooting this clock if you have any issues. Thanks for reading my little review, I hope this helps anyone that buy this kit.

This is a fascinating thing to build, but don't be in a hurry. I got two, one for me and my son and another for my father so we could have a remote build activity during the lockdowns. We had shared build times via zoom once per week over about 6 weeks. It's hanging on my wall and is keeping great time. A few tings to note: 1) Precision is critical. Be patient. 2) Get a set of needle files with it - the cogs need to very smooth and you will want to make sure that all parts that mesh are mirror smooth when graphite (pencil) is applied. 3) Do the filing of the cogs BEFORE any construction (it's a pain to do it after the fact). 4) All cogs MUST be perpendicular to the shaft. 5) Dry fit everything before gluing it.

A new filter rod is needed to complete the clock