Clock Project

Intention

- Goal: create a functional, laser-cut clock limited to CMU laser cutting materials

- Motivations: practice laser cutting software, practice the engineering and design process to create a functional object 

Context

- for my apartment wall because the microwave clock is not legible from the sofa chairs in the living room

- industrial, modern aesthetic combined with traditional aspects

- color themes: grey, black, red

- should be around 1 foot in diameter to fit the wall and be readable

- floors are wood but the fans, pipes, and utilities are a metallic medium grey countertops are grey marble    

Process

I wanted to incorporate industrial/modern and traditional elements to my clock because my apartment has the industrial feel of grey metallic appliances and utilities, but the traditional feel of wooden floors. My instinct was to create a roman numeral clock for the traditional aspect and incorporate the more modern aspects in its execution. This led me to explore a breadth of roman numeral clocks. I used the metal, roman numeral clock below as inspiration.

Here are some preliminary sketches.

Here, I explore my favorite design in depth. I incorporated both traditional and modern features into the typography: the traditional lies in the roman numerals and the modern lies in the pristine, sans-serif nature of the numbers. I also established this contrast in the materials by using two layers – a layer of grey semi-transparent acrylic on plywood.    

Product

I began creating my basic clock outline in Illustrator, starting with the roman numerals and adding them to a center circle. After taking some measurements of the clock parts and other materials using a caliper, I had to modify some of the dimensions. One of main the difficulties was centering each number at it’s clock position, since each roman numeral held a different number of characters. Another issue I had was incorporating some etching and scoring into my design. Since I wanted to maintain a fairly clean design, I designed a couple of etched rectangles for the center in Fusion360. However, when using the Rabbit Laser software, I realized that I didn’t want to keep them, so I etched my initials on the back and scored two dots on either side.    

Reflection

If I were to do this project again, I think I would be more careful with sizing. My final clock turned out to be smaller than I would have liked because I would have like the hands of my clock to hover above the center circle only (and not overlap with the roman numerals). I also messed up the measurement for the size of the center hole used to hold the other clock parts, which led me to do a re-cut. This was especially frustrating because each layer of my clock has a very large perimeter, which makes each trial a lengthy process. I also should have made the hole slightly larger than measured because I had a hard time putting in the screw and sanding down acrylic was fairly difficult. Overall, I learned a lot about sizing and how test cuts are very important when it comes to more extensive projects.

Collaboration or Attribution

Thanks to Louise Larson for her feedback and help with using the Fusion360 software.