Tourbillon Project

I was interested to push the limits of 3D printing... basically for the hell of it, and to distract me from being indoors ~24x7.

I spent upwards of two months on/off trying to get this project to work. I'm stumped. The ticker won't tick reliably.

So I failed. But I learned a lot about clocks, but not about the one thing I really needed to understand - why it didn't work. I read what I could, but the design principles must be acquired over a long period, and live in folks' heads. There's a lot of subtlety to it.

The problem is that I don't understand if this is a shortcoming of the printing process, or the design.

This video shows the best result I ever got from the escapment mechanism. I need to understand.

First minor success

The following is the diagnostic video I made that made me give up.

Here's the heap of parts I made, and remade, and remade...

And here are all the aprts that I reprinted, or broken trying to get it to work.

Summary - pretty, but actually doesn't work.

Diary

I decided to start with best defined project I could find. The F360 files, and all the STL are available.

https://pinshape.com/items/30212-3d-printed-3d-printed-watch-with-tourbillon

Progress

It's been hard to get other parts of my clock to print. Some of the print jobs have run for more than 24 hours. I wonder if there is some feature of the deign that provokes mis-registration. It's especially irritating of course, when the job runs all night and everything sinle piece is crap..

Every gear was broken

Some of the bigger pieces had defects at the midpoint of tall thing bits, and they simply snapped.

Others were not even particularly thin, but snapped on being touched.

The top of this leg simply snapped off

First sign of progress - regulator cage

The regulator cage is assembled. It took a lot of fiddling to get it to work at all, and it is still very finicky. It seems to require just the right amount of force to work correctly.