NEMES

May 2010 Meeting

After missing our April meeting due to the unprecedented flooding of the Charles River which flows mere feet away from the Charles River Museum of Industry where we meet it was great to be back together.

The acting director of the museum addressed the group to update us on what was going on and to let us know that the museum directors and staff plan to be right where they are for a long time to come. The damage to the museum was extensive but not fatal and work is under way to recover from the rivers intrusion. Although therre was good insurance coverage they will still have to raise over $1,000,000 fully restore thing to the way they were before the flood. The majority of the Waltham Clock Works building is devoted to elderly housing and the residents were not forced to leave their homes so that was good.

Our speaker this month was John Goodman. John is the fellow who had the Annosphere at our show in February along with the internal ring gear cutter and gear cutter he built to make the gears for this instrument. John got interested in building clocks when he was in high school. He recently discovered that a simple combination of four gears could produce a gear ratio of 365.2422 to 1, enabling a clock to include a yearly cycle along with a daily cycle.

To build this clock (which he dubbed an Annosphere) he first needed to make gears; to make gears he needed to build a gear cutter. Building a prototype showed him why he needed to build a second gear cutter. As is often the case, the tools may be more interesting than the final product. He’ll be showing these tools and explaining the design process and the construction techniques of the Annosphere, supplemented with animated illustrations of the gear ratio

Machine used for making the internal ring gears.