the Mechanical stuff is the most amazing as getting the math to work and the gears to mesh is an amazing challenge.
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Woof…those are cool!
I love all of these, but they make me feel so inadequate with regards my own early experiments…great inspiration to get cracking with my forge though!!!
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@ppipa1 What type of challenges did you have using the Clayton clock and the Orrery plans with the glowforge? I’d like to build a clock but I want to know what i’m getting into first. Which plans did you use? and what would you do differently if you were going to do it again?
I’d like to second scott_trahey’s question – especially regarding software (what’d you use to go from Clayton’s DXF to SVG?)
Gosh, your work is incredible! Not to mention your photography skills!
Keep up the amazing making!
Amazing work!!! 
Phew, those are hard questions. For the orrery I did a near complete redesign of the plans using online orrery plans & Boyers to bootstrap from. It was grueling and there were five iterations before I was happy with the results. I just kept at it to be honest. The clock was a challenge mostly for thickness of material reasons. I laminated many of the parts from two or more sheets of thinner stock and then the real challenge was determining the new lengths for standoffs since my thickness measurements were very different from the original design. In the end I quite literally made the standoffs by laminating wooden ( draftboard) rings together and adding a wraparound veneer to give the appearance of real turned stock. careful rotation of the seams in the end helps to disguise that. If my garage woodshed was functional ATM I would have done them the old and “correct” way & only used the GF for the gears & frame. My biggest AHHA moment was when I realized why all my gears were running crooked (in both projects!) My GF bed was slightly, very slightly, off level and I was getting angled cuts. Making sure that it was flat & stock was flat is critical to getting the gears to sit evenly on those shafts. I actually made each gear by printing one copy, then mirroring the image and printing another. Then, being careful to keep this mirrored orientation I laminated the two pieces together. This makes up for the uneven angle of a laser cut through acrylic. essentially by doing this…
As we know a cut through acrylic looks like this
\/ in some sense, not this ||
so I laminated to cause those v’s to cancel each other
/ \ over \ /
creating in the end a tube through the gears that self corrects for that angle. It was tons of trial and Error Error Error before I had that lightbulb moment.
Beyond that the biggest problems I had were getting smooth crank action on the orrery (I eliminated the crank in the end & run the largest gear by hand to rotate) and setting the seconds interval correctly for the clock. Again I trial & error(ed) until I hit a second length I can live with. It is not as accurate as the original design.
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I use Illustrator but I believe there are other lower cost options for conversion out there. Alas I do not remember how I did it in the olden days pre illustrator. Perhaps someone else could chime in here.
Thanks!
I love this comment because I think I summarizes so well how so many of us feel. Remember, for the most part when people post finished work you are not getting a true window into all the fails that led to that point. Keep at it. You should see the size of my “reject/repurpose/reuse” bin!!!
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Huh! You’ve just got one? You must be really good…I’ve got five. 
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Hey Guys. BIG Correction / Note!!! The Clock is a BRIAN LAW design!!! Not a Clayton Boyer! The Orrery Is a Boyer based design. My sincerest apologies for the confusion!!! I purchased the designs years ago & the clock got filed in the wrong artist folder. I only just realized my error this moment when searching the artists homepages. I have bought many design from both artists over the years and I just messed up on this one. My Bad!
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Thanks for updating this! I searched the Boyer site forever trying to figure out which one it was and figured you had just made a lot of changes to it and it was unrecognizable . 
Holy moly!!! Your creations are fantastic!!
For “State of the World” have you applied veneer to the acrylic, or is the acrylic thin pieces following the coastlines? If you applied the veneer to acrylic, what did you use for adhesive?
The veneer is applied to the acrylic directly. I used 3m super 77 spray adhesive. It did not work flawlessly and in places I’ve brushed superglue between layers and pressed back down. In particular this wall gets direct sun in the afternoon and the temp gets as high as mid 80’s. When that happens I see some separation particularly from the veneers that were rolled for shipping originally. Definitely still a work in progress.
Here are some updated images of the work in progress. Bad lighting at the moment, sorry. You can see Mauritania is peeling at the southern border and will need touch up glue.
Greenland & the South Pacific still to go!
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Flying back from London last week it was clouds over the UK and Ireland, clouds over the Atlantic, solid clouds everywhere except they all went away at the east coast of Greenland. It was amazing. And then the clouds came back once we were over the ocean again.
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