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Man Builds 7-foot Grandfather Clock from Lego

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the snappy-timepieces dept.

Ravalox writes "Eric Harshbarger has built a 7-foot-tall grandfather clock exclusively from Lego. It keeps accurate time and needs no electricity; it needs to be weight reset every 13 hours. Other pictures include the gears, numbers, the face, and the pendulum mechanics."

3 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. Re:slashdotted already... by meatflower · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When you design an escapement gear made only out of lego's that actually works than YOU can bitch about the colors matching.

  2. Re:No Electricity.... by Dephex+Twin · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Doesn't guy wrote this know that at the time when a these 6 foot wonders were invented, there WAS NO ELECTRICITY !!. It runs on pure potential energy stored in weights.
    I think it is safe to say he does, since he built a working grandfather clock, and probably didn't re-invent the mechanical design himself from scratch.

    The interesting part is that it would be much harder to make a real grandfather clock (like the one at my ancestral home) - because Lego in comparison is easier to build.
    For building the housing, this might be, but if you are limiting yourself to pure lego parts, there is a good deal of creativity involved in order to make a full-sized, functioning clock that is accurate without cheating.
    --

    If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
  3. Re:server made of lego too? by zeath · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I guess I don't understand the lego thing. Mind you, I grew up with an arc welder around and had lots of scrap to build stuff out of. Tinkering with legos, well, seemed silly when I could fabricate a perfectly useful table fireplace log holder which can support 500lbs without as much as a strain. :)

    I would definently agree with you; playing with heat and metal is far more practical than plastic blocks, but making stuff with legos offers both a handicap and limitation that challenges the builders to be creative. With stuff like this it's not so much "look what I can do" but rather "look what I can do with all these limitations and obstacles". To reverse the roles, welding together a bunch of metal interlocking blocks and making a small castle out of them would be equally cool, even though the legos would have been an easier solution and ultimately achieved the same design.