Gravity arms for the double three-legged gravity escapement

Gravity arms

This is a quick first look at the gravity arms for the escapement. Unfortunately we have no direct plans for these arms, although the principal is explained in a number of book that we have along with generic designs. We also have limited access to another Smith clock with one, but the people of Duffield would probably not appreciate it if we stopped the clock and dismantled it to scribe around its parts. As a result these have been made from a combination of reference books, awkwardly taken part-measurements and careful study of our own photographs.

I’m not going to include any technical details yet because we don’t know if they will work! We hope this won’t become a process of trial and error but there might be some fine tuning to be done at least. I’ll post more pictures of our progress and details of any problems we find as we continue. Once we have it working I will, of course, provide proper details. These arms have been made from multiple parts welded together which I don’t imagine is how the originals were done, presumably they were cut from a single piece. However, this technique has made them a lot quicker and easier to produce (important since we might have to make more variations yet, if they don’t work) and the results look fine. Even easier would have been getting access to a water-jet cutter, then we could have just drawn them up on the computer and a few minutes later had a perfect set pop out of the machine.

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