My homemade pendulum clock taught me a harsh lesson about friction!

I spent weeks building it, only to discover that air resistance and bearing wear made it lose minutes every hour. Now it's a beautiful but utterly useless decoration on my wall!

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3 Comments

betty_taylor7mo ago

Ugh, I feel this so hard! I mean, I tried making a sundial for my garden last summer, and idk, I totally underestimated how even slight cloud cover would throw off the shadow alignment. Maybe it's just me but I spent ages calibrating it, only to realize it was basically decorative after one cloudy week. It's frustrating when something you put so much work into doesn't function right, but hey, at least it looks nice? I guess with clocks and sundials, precision is just brutal to achieve without professional tools.

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laura3607mo ago

Actually... that's kind of the whole point of a sundial? It's a solar time instrument, so if the sun isn't out, it obviously can't work. They were never meant for telling time on cloudy days or at night, that's why mechanical clocks were such a revolution. The real precision issue is accounting for your exact longitude and the equation of time, not just the base alignment. It sounds like you built a correct sundial, it just can't defy its own nature.

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patriciareed6mo ago

My sundial project last year taught me the same thing.

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