In my initial sketch, I actually wanted to have two clock faces; one for each mechanism: one that would track an Earth day and one a lunar day. However, in the end, I managed to find a gearbox that tracks the time for each and combined the faces together. I was also experimenting a lot with compasses, astrolabes, cardinals, and maritime equipment in my first design, but I strayed away from this and instead decided to use a chart of NY harbor as my background.
The one thing that I really kept from this design was the rope around the exterior of the clock.
I was influenced by pretty much everything nautical. From ropes to charts to water to ships. I was most influenced by the pattern of coiled ropes and wanted to stack my clock up, but was unable to because I couldn't find a large enough material. However, I still included the texture of the rope as a frame for the clock face. For the background, I was looking at a number of different nautical charts of NYC harbor. Some were lacking a lot of detail because they were almost 300 years old while others were too recent. I eventually went with a chart from 1911 because NYC was still very much in a golden age of overseas shipping and had all of its ports and piers.
One idea I would've loved to explore a bit more, but decided against due to the time crunch, was stacking separate layers to create a typographic map of the sea floor. Kind of like the image below. However, in the end, I loved the way the painted wood looked like and decided to do something similar.
After finalizing my sketch and idea, I started to sketch out the parts in Fusion. I used a reference images of coiled rope and the NYC chart from 1911 to sketch on top of once I got all my dimensions set. Sketching the coil was tricky when it came to lining it up with the overall diameter of the clock but once I finalized 1/4 of it, I used the circular pattern tool and finished it all the way around.
Then, I began to model my clock face. I started with the exterior numbers and tick marks. I did this by stretching out construction lines from the center of the circle to the outside and broke it up perfectly into 59 sections. I placed the hour marks on the appropriate spots and then drafted another, inner ring which was responsible for keeping track of the tide. Luckily the lunar gearbox I had is calibrated to work on a normal clock face so the tidal hours were in the same spots as the normal numbers. However, instead of keeping time, they keep track of how many hours there are left until the next high or low tide.
After that, I moved on to drafting the background design. It was a lot of very tiny, meticulous lines but eventually I managed to draw out all of the piers, ports, and details. I had a lot more planned for the background design of my clock, like showing the depths of the water, city blocks, and including more text for geographic features, but Fusion started to slow down dramatically as a result of all the lines. Afterwards my file became unusable and continued to crash as I attempted to work on it. So, I decided to move onto AutoCAD and finished these details here. As a result, I wasn't able to get renderings of my piece which was really upsetting but I still managed to finish it to my liking without having to redo the whole face.
Then it came to laser cutting. I think this is the most complex piece I've laser cut before and the first time I was laser cutting wood. So it was definitely a big learning experience! I'm familiar with the required settings for acrylic and illustration board but the plywood was a whole new beast. Additionally, I had to ensure that all of my lines were closed bodies to get the laser cutter to do what I wanted when it came to engraving, scoring, and cutting. Below, you can see the multiple failed attempts where it didn't cut through all the way or cut through in places where I didn't want it to.
In the end, after figuring out my settings on the outer frame, the face came out great on the first attempt. So, I definitely became much more familiar with the material towards the end of the process.
