A rolling ball clock is a clock which displays time by means of balls and rails. [1]
A rolling ball clock is a clock which displays time by means of balls and rails. [1]
The rolling ball clock was invented by Harley Mayenschein in the 1970s. He patented the design and founded Idle Tyme Corporation in 1978, which manufactured these clocks from solid hardwoods. Later, a license on the patent was sold to Arrow Handicraft. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Mattel also made them under license. The following excerpts from a letter written by Patrice Gunville, the daughter of Harley Mayenschein, give some detail of the history of the clock: [2]
The very first original design (before patent) was simple 1⁄4 × 1⁄4 inch strips of wood which the balls would roll on, much like the design of railroad tracks. [Harley Mayenschein] had shown his new invention to friends and they all wished to have one, so as his hobby, he created them. Before he knew it, with a month's time, he had over 300 orders. So my brothers and I began to help him make piece parts on our spare time, and he would then put the clocks together and spray paint them black and sell them for $75.00 each. Within six months we found my father's hobby had grown into a enterprise, so we converted the garage into a workshop, purchased a small table saw, a drill, etc. Soon afterwards we had to find larger quarters, quit our jobs and hire people to help with creating the clocks to sell. As well as find suppliers for wood, motors, linecords, ballbearings etc. We had moved into an industrial site on Tower Hill Road in Schaumburg.
[Harley Mayenschein] had also occasionally created various sized of the clock just for the fun of it and specialties for various business/organizations. A ball clock for golf courses which used golf balls. A candy shop with gum balls. Sporting shop with baseballs. I personally own a small watch size clock, I could wear on my wrist made from BB’s. Which I consider simply as a novelty, since...well you understand. The largest ball clock he created stands at Western Lanes 904 S. Tayler Street in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Which they paid $10,000 for. It stands 8 ft high, 16 ft wide and 8 ft deep. It has 6 automobile shock absorbers, six timing devices, 1,446 sets of bolts, nuts and washers and a single one-sixth horse power motor. And took 700 hours to build, yes it’s made for bowling balls.
The original design of the rolling ball clock has three main rails – two labeled for minutes and one for hours. The bottom rail represents the hours, the middle rail represents the minutes in multiples of 5 or 10, while the top rail represents single minutes 1 through 4. By adding the displayed values of the two rails one could get an accurate measurement of the minutes. For example, if there are eight balls on the bottom rail, nine on the middle rail, and two on the top rail, the time would read 8:47.
An arm driven by an electric motor scoops up a ball every minute. Every five minutes, the top rail will dump and deposit a ball on the second rail. Every hour, the upper and middle rails dump and one ball is transferred to the bottom rail to increment the hours. At 1:00 all three rails dump their balls to the feed rail at the bottom.
The original design used an AC motor to move the arm continuously at a constant speed of 1 RPM. Later designs branded "Time Machine" used a low voltage DC motor to spin the arm once at a faster speed, with a modified quartz clock mechanism triggering the motor to drop a single ball at the top of the track.
The original design used steel balls, while the "Deluxe" model sold in the 1980s was twice as big and had plastic balls instead. There are homemade versions of the design which employ a 9-minute top rail, with the middle rail representing multiples of 10. KinetiClocK for example, is the newest rolling ball clock design with a focus on simplicity, durability, and aesthetics. Arrow Handicraft also manufactured the coin clock, which used pennies instead of balls.
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A bearing is a machine element that constrains relative motion to only the desired motion and reduces friction between moving parts. The design of the bearing may, for example, provide for free linear movement of the moving part or for free rotation around a fixed axis; or, it may prevent a motion by controlling the vectors of normal forces that bear on the moving parts. Most bearings facilitate the desired motion by minimizing friction. Bearings are classified broadly according to the type of operation, the motions allowed, or the directions of the loads (forces) applied to the parts.
The MacPherson strut is a type of automotive suspension system that uses the top of a telescopic damper as the upper steering pivot. It is widely used in the front suspension of modern vehicles. The name comes from American automotive engineer Earle S. MacPherson, who invented and developed the design.
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A billiard table or billiards table is a bounded table on which cue sports are played. In the modern era, all billiards tables provide a flat surface usually made of quarried slate, that is covered with cloth, and surrounded by vulcanized rubber cushions, with the whole thing elevated above the floor. More specific terms are used for specific sports, such as snooker table and pool table, and different-sized billiard balls are used on these table types. An obsolete term is billiard board, used in the 16th and 17th centuries.
The Nintendo Tumbler Puzzle, also known as the Ten Billion Barrel in English and originally tenbirion (テンビリオン) in Japanese, is a mathematical and mechanical puzzle. It is one of many mechanical toys invented by Gunpei Yokoi at Nintendo. It was released in 1980 under U.S. patent 4,376,537. The patent expired in March 1995 due to non-payment of a maintenance fee.
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A current collector is a device used in trolleybuses, trams, electric locomotives and EMUs to carry electric power (current) from overhead lines, electric third rails, or ground-level power supplies to the electrical equipment of the vehicles. Those for overhead wires are roof-mounted devices, those for rails are mounted on the bogies.
The featherbed frame was a motorcycle frame invented by the McCandless brothers and offered to the British Norton motorcycle company to improve the performance of their racing motorcycles in 1950. It was considered revolutionary at the time, and the best handling frame that a racer could have. Later adopted for Norton production motorcycles, it was also widely used by builders of custom hybrids such as the Triton, becoming legendary and remaining influential to this day.
Baulk road is the name given to a type of railway track or 'rail road' that is formed using rails carried on continuous timber bearings, as opposed to the more familiar 'cross-sleeper' track that uses closely spaced sleepers or ties to give intermittent support to stronger rails.
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