Philo's Lego Technic Cuckoo Clock

[DLuders]

Philo (Phillippe Hurbain) posted three YouTube videos of his Lego Technic Cuckoo Clock. He wrote that it was his "SeTechnic May 2011 competition submission. Rules (in French): http://www.setechnic.com/Forum/topic4361.html . Purpose of this competition is to build a purely mechanical cuckoo clock. I choose to use two wind-up motors, one for the clock and one for the cuckoo. This clock runs for a bit more than 6 minutes, and the cuckoo is designed to go out every 3 minutes....The escapement is borrowed from BenVanDeWaal W4.3

." There are 24 images on his Brickshelf gallery.

This

shows the detail of the Cuckoo Clock:

The next

shows the making and testing of the clock mechanisms:

Philo's submission video to SeTechnic:

. The cuckoo bird comes out at the 2'35" and at 5'35" points of the video. Read more about this clock on the original SeTechnic post (in French) or this English translation -- scroll 1/4 the way down the page. Edited May 30, 2011 by DLuders

[Fuzzylegobricks]

What an amazing clock! TLC has instructions for one on their website.

It is a little odd that the bird does not come out every minute or hour.

The creation also self runs because the wind up motor in the back!

[bord4kop]

This is something I like

:thumbup:

I was just thinking last night and this morning, what else can you build besides the obvious cars and trucks?

(Well anything actually, but you catch my drift eh!? )

[DLuders]

On his website, Nico71 posted pictures and a YouTube video of his Lego Cuckoo Clock. He wrote:

"The clock has a standard minute-hand and second-hand with 1/60 gear ratio composed of worm/24t, 20/20t and 16/40t. There is not hour-hand because of the available place. The pendulum mechanism is not a vertical pendulum but a double horizontal pendulum with two masses (61mm wheels). The escapement wheel is composed of two 6-tooth wheels. The accuracy is +-10% for 1 second because of play. The autonomy is rather good, with 50cm string, a 5/1 ratio before the escapement wheel and 150g of counterweight, the autonomy is 30min. With a pulley and 1m of string and 300g, it may be reach 1h of autonomy."

"Concerning the cuckoo, it is powered by a weight lifted up by the minute-hand (one time each hour), when it reaches a special point, it falls down and make the cuckoo get out . The mechanism is simple and has no need to be lifted. Consequently, the clock has one counterweight to power all functions. The counterweight can be easily lifted up thanks to the sliding wheel."

"Despite the fact that the cuckoo out mechanism has a non-linear motion, I think that it doesn’t get out enough time. The ideal behaviour must be a normal behaviour during the lifting and a viscous behaviour during the fall in order to slown down the cuckoo. To finish, I will certainly create the building instructions !"

[Philo]

I did a write up on my website, basically an English translation of my submission.

Enjoy!

[Philo]

Sorry to revive an old thread... but thanks to the hard work of Daniel Weissengruber, my Cuckoo Clock now has a LDraw/MLCad file with detailed building steps. Many thanks, Daniel!

[legolijntje]

Nice work!

May I try to make some LPub instructions of Daniel's file?

EDIT: Oh, I thought it were only a bunch of steps, but now I looked better at the file and it seems Daniel has created the full instructions: stepts, rotsteps, submodels etc. I wonder why he hasn't made some LPub instructions himself, he has already done 90% of the work...

[Philo]

Indeed, a huge part is already done! Anyway, neither me nor - I think - Daniel would object if someone went a bit further...

[legolijntje]

Well, it seems something went wrong with the submodel for the Cuckoo and its mechanism. It's a bit difficult to explain in words, but it isn't a submodel anymore in the file and without any steps. Considering the quality of all the other things, I think something wen wrong here. Philo, maybe you could contact Daniel and see if can correct it (if this is indeed a mistake), because it would be a waste of time for him if he made the whole submodel with steps and then post a model without these steps.

[Philo]

Mmhhh... maybe it's me who made a mistake, I rebuilt the mpd because the original one had indirection issue when opened with LDView. Here is Daniel's original file. What is the assembly part missing steps according to you?

[legolijntje]

Well, it's the submodel Cuckoo_Mechanic, take a look at this picture. A picture says more than 1000 words. Do you see what happens? The whole submodel is placed as 1 step, and also take a look at the right-side, where it says "MLCAD BTG Sub-Model_Cuckoo_Mechanic" all the time inside this submodel. I don't know what that means Also note that it's not exactly a submodel, as there isn't a [submodelname].ldr in the model with the submodel located at the end of the .mpd file, sintead, all the parts of this submodel are just located somewhere in the file. I hope you know what I mean.

[Philo]

OK - indeed, Daniel left the group of parts instead of referencing the (properly stepped) submodel!

Replace all the lines "MLCAD BTG Sub-Model_Cuckoo_Mechanic" (and the following line in each case) with a single

"1 16 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 Sub-Model_Cuckoo_Mechanic.ldr"

and everything should be OK!

[legolijntje]

OK - indeed, Daniel left the group of parts instead of referencing the (properly stepped) submodel!

Replace all the lines "MLCAD BTG Sub-Model_Cuckoo_Mechanic" (and the following line in each case) with a single

"1 16 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 Sub-Model_Cuckoo_Mechanic.ldr"

and everything should be OK!

Well, that doesn't solve the problem, because these "MLCAD BTG Sub-Model_Cuckoo_Mechanic" lines and the parts between them, is the submodel. When I replace it with "1 16 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 Sub-Model_Cuckoo_Mechanic.ldr", it's referencing to a submodel that isn't included in the file.

[Philo]

Ah - my bad: submodel was in my folder (so everything worked fine here), but since it was not referenced, it was not included in mpd... Download it again, it should be fine now.