I always wanted to build a grandfather clock. Maybe it’s just not my style, but I’m not a big fan of furniture that drips with ornamentation. I prefer the simplicity of the colonial and mission styles. With that in mind, I put together a clock a few years ago when my sister and her husband bought a new house. It was to be a simple design that incorporated an electric clock, and it was to serve as practice for the day when I build my own clock. To start, I bought this 50-year-old wall clock off of ebay:
It’s an ugly wall clock that’s supposed to look like a pocket watch. But I didn’t care about the casing; I just wanted the face and clockworks.
Once I had the dimensions of the clock face, I could start to build the housing. It came together pretty easily, considering I had to work in the cramped backyard of my townhome apartment:
I look back on this project as a chance to practice with angles and mitered joints. This door took a lot of time for me to lay out. The only tools I had were a circular saw, a jigsaw, and a plastic miter box and handsaw. So many of the pieces had to be cut by hand:
Here’s it is with the door in place. Even though it looked exactly like my original design, I found that I wasn’t happy with it. I thought the arch in the baseboard looked terrible, and I thought the three segments needed some detail work to better break them up.
Here you can see that I added some flared accent pieces to divide the body segments. Then I threw a few coats of stain on it and it was ready for delivery.
Here’s the finished product. You can see how much better it looks with the accent molding between each segment and a shorter baseboard:
Sadly, I think the clock runs slow, so they just use it to store bar accessories.
That clock you started off with looks exactly like the one that is at my grandfather’s… Thanks for the memories. Great job on the product, looks awesome.