Good news, everyone! A huge, momentous occasion! Last weekend I finished the design drawings for the first prototype on an old project of mine I've been working on for a while. A long time. A very time. How long have I been working on it?

Around nine years. Kerath knows how many thousands (or even tens of thousands) of hours I've put into it.

The piece in question is my mechanical D'ni clock. The whole idea of the project - to make a real-life clock that ticks in D'ni time. I've submitted a few snippets of it here, here and here in the past. But now it's all done. The design work is complete and I've sent the plans to the laser cutting company for them to manufacture the parts. When I look at it now, at my simulations of the assembled clock and my drawings of the individual components, it looks so simple... You'd never guess I'd spent that much time on it. But trust me, all the mathematics behind it is insanely complicated.

I've uploaded a comparatively low-resolution copy of the completed plans (21.8KB) if anyone wants to see them. White lines are cutting and black lines are engraving. It's only prototype 1 and I'm not sure if it'll even tick unassisted. I could have made an error in my mathematics sometime in the last nine years. In fact, I'm expecting there to be an error somewhere that will require correction, thus this is only being referred to as "prototype 1" and not the finished product.


It feels... really weird to have this project "finished" after so long, even if it's not completely done yet. Kindof calm and relaxing. I've slept really well the last few nights.


Expect some uploads of it sometime soon!