Record Clock

It was my wife's birthday coming up soon, and I knew she wanted to get a new clock for our living room, so in the do-it-yourself spirit, I decided to make her one. I'd seen a couple of previous projects where clocks had been build around an old LP vinyl record, and wanted to try the same idea myself, and see if I could do it on Carvey (3D carving machine).

I picked up a $7 clock from Kmart and pulled off the case to retrieve the clock mechanism inside. I bought a second hand 7'' single vinyl record ("Total Eclipse of the Heart" by Bonnie Tyler, quite randomly :) ) which I would use to carve on my clock face using Carvey. I ended up going with a 7'' as I couldn't fit a 12'' inside Carvey. I knocked up a quick design in Easel by just using a standard font and a few icons for fun arranged around a 7'' circle. To do the setup in Carvey, I used a bit of MDF waste board and an additional 1-by-1'' piece of 2mm scrap wood to raise the height of Carvey's smart sensor to a little bit above the 1mm thickness of the record: because the record is a circle, you can't get it under the clamp while also being able to carve on all sides. I carved with a 1/16'' up-cut bit (the only 1/16'' bit available), and set the material type to "acrylic" (seemed the closest match). This worked pretty well, however the vinyl is pretty soft and so there was a pretty sizeable bur of vinyl that was stuck around the bit for most of the process: this ended up "buffing" around the edge of each number cutout, but didn't really have too much of a negative impact on the final result.

Once the clock face was carved, I glued on the clock mechanism to the back, placed the clock hands back on and pasted on a family pic to the record label area: if I'd found a second hand single of a song my wife really liked, I might have just kept the label as-is.

Final result looks pretty cool, and not bad for a $9 present :) (I might be a bit of a cheap skate sometimes, but in this case I did get her a few other things too!)