Mounting the Dials

We’re really in the home stretch of assembly now! All of the fixed dials were mounted at the same time to ensure that they were visually spaced correctly. This is really an overconstrained exercise as the dials must visually have their holes centered on the protruding arbors as the primary objective, and orientation established to the best extent allowable. In particular, the 270 and 90 degree marks on the orrery and eclipse outer dials were aligned, and the 6 o’clock maker on the mean time dial was aligned with the zero of the equation of time dial. World time and solar time dials were simply oriented vertically.

However, to allow this simultaneous installation the clock had to be laid down horizontally. The glass was removed to lighten the frame, and all weights and the pendulum were removed. Thankfully this went smoothly but it was certainly a stressful event.

Additionally, the sunrise and sunset sectors were bonded on while in this position.

At this point, the clock has less than 10 pieces of the roughly 600 or so left to make and install. Specifically, they are ones that are best sized base on assembly measurements of performance so we have to really get into system testing to start them.

Thus I declare assembly complete and testing complete!