Grandfather Clock

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:

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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:

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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:

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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.

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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.

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Here’s the finished product. You can see how much better it looks with the accent molding between each segment and a shorter baseboard:

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Sadly, I think the clock runs slow, so they just use it to store bar accessories.

Grandfather Clock
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One thought on “Grandfather Clock

  • September 3, 2010 at 12:56 am
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    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.

    Reply

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