Ball Clock II ~ Hiccup

Photo 071Not everything on a project like this can go as planned it seems, especially when you make things up as you go along;  I have had to remake a few pieces that didn’t quite work out the way I had planned.

For the last two months, every now and then, I would get a ball jam in the exit spiral.  The clock would run for a few days straight and then I would see balls jammed in the spiral.  Each time it happened I would try to figure out what and how it had happened.  It appeared that when the minute rack dumped (9 balls) and the 10s of minutes dumped (5 balls), there were times that the balls would collide in the spiral.  I attributed this to a lack of smoothness of the minutes balls running down the spiral and not clearing a path for the 10s of minutes balls in time.

So, I tried modifying the spiral with flat strips of brass to make a smoother travel down for the balls.  That worked to make things run faster, but did not completely alleviate the jamming, which occurred now maybe once a week.  Rats!

A closer look by taking a slow motion movie, showed that the balls on a upper turn would rub against the balls just below them, allowing them to jam against one another and slow the decent.

It was time to take a new approach and remake the spiral.

Photo 090This time I did not make it as tight and made sure that the balls could not touch each other vertically from one loop to another.

This also sped up the balls going down the spiral, gave good separation between the minutes ball dump and the tens ball dump, plus created a good aesthetic in the process.

The downside is it took about 16 hours to make the new one.

The lovely thing about physics is that you cannot ignore it.  If it happens once…it will happen again as it is really only a matter of time.

I suppose that is true with a lot of things in life as well.  Sometimes you just have to “bite the bullet” so to speak and just do it!

Now, back to the Aux Power.

 

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One Response to Ball Clock II ~ Hiccup

  1. Michael says:

    Good ol’ physics 😉

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