At first I chose the circular movement machine from one of the books as my midterm project. I had sketched its parts in illustrator and built the low-fidelity prototype before scrapping the project for being rather simplistic and boring. I had originally planned to add some interesting twists to it, but that was before this caught my eye.

This is the same technology used to make a camera lens. I thought it was super cool. The mechanical iris is a very commonly used design, and some googling led me to this Instructable post on a mechanical iris.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Mechanical-iris-v20/

However, I still felt like it needed an extra something. It’s a very cool design, but it I thought would be cooler if there was something behind the iris when it opened. I had tinkered around with the idea of a bird popping out for quite a while, but ultimately gave up because I realized how hard it was to translate the up-and-down motion of opening the iris to the forward-and-back motion of the bird.

Afterwards I went through a lot of ideas before finally settling in on the idea of the practical clock. Having made up my mind, I went online to look for clocks to take apart only to find that they already sell the movement kits separately. I bought this one from Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Quartz-Clock-Movement-Black-Spade/dp/B01CBTK6OW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1458014027&sr=8-1-spons&keywords=clock+movement+kit&psc=1

While the clock was getting shipped here, I began work on the Iris. I had to modify the pdf file given in the Instructables post to allow it to stand up. The laser cutting went smoothly thanks to the many trials and tribulations of cutting the war owl. The dowels however, were extremely annoying. Not only was it very hard to cut it into short little stubs, but they were originally very rigid and hard to move, and quite a bit of sanding was required.

Once I got the movement itself, I measured the dimensions and immediately set out to design the clock. I modified some flower design I found online to make it all pretty and stuff.

This was the first prototype, but it had some problems. First off, the clock hands they included in the kit was way too long. The numbers themselves were also a little bit too far away from the center and was hard to read when you look at it from the hole in the iris. Finally, I really felt like something else should be added onto the right side – it only looks half done.

I went back Illustrator to design two clock hands based on my measurements of the clock hand they included, edited the numbers to be closer to the center, and added this fellow to the right side of the clock.

I thought the bird looked really nice on the clock, and the numbers are now much easier to read. But the one major problem left is that the clock hands didn’t fit! And I meant that in two different ways. First of all, the wood I used to make the clock hands was too thick and the clock’s center axis didn’t have enough room. Also, the slots I cut into the hands to insert them onto the axis was too small and they couldn’t even fit into the axis.

The solution to the first problem was Plexiglass, which I found out about thanks to Helen. The second problem however, proved to be much more tedious. The dimensions of the openings in the clock hands inherently were very hard to measure. So I solved it using a lot of trial and error (I was up to like my 7th revision before they finally fit).

I had originally wanted to paint the clock blue and white, but the white paint I ordered from Amazon got used up before I could paint anything, so I decided to take a page from my partner Tibbie and use Linseed oil instead. I painted about half of the clock in it to create a contrast between the dark and light wood.

With that finally done, all that was left was to put everything together. As expected, I ran into some problems along the way. Like putting the iris handle in the wrong position, parts being blocked by other parts, and some other random stuff. But it was expected, and with the help of gorilla glue, everything came together  sturdily. And I mean very sturdily, because I dropped it like two or three times during the assembly but nothing broke!

Ultimately though, I wish I could have come in during Spring Break to work on it or something. I still thought that my original idea of having a bird pop out of the iris is cooler. More engravings and possibly an outer layer acrylic were also in consideration.