Altimeter Styled Wall Clock - 200mm face, hands, and frame by Biketool

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

Is your office or dorm ascending from 2600 feet or is it two thirty in the afternoon?
This is 3D model hands, optional 'barber pole' stripes cover disc. and a clock face on A4 formatted PDFs stylized after a light aircraft's altimeter, except that the scale reads either 1-12 or 0-11 for hours rather than 0-9 for x1000 and x100 feet elevation. If the holes are not the right size for you grab OpenSCAD and adjust the radius in the code and recompile your .STLs. I did not scale this to any particular measurement other than fitting on a sheet of A4 paper so I got lucky with a nice round 200mm face size. The .SCAD/>STL files are scaled to the image on the PDF. I took a public domain image from Wikimedia commons and cut/pasted the art bits, added the "100 feet", ALT, and CALIBRATED TO 25 000 FT text to the image in Arial or Arial Bold font. I hand hacked the 1-12 numbers font in Gimp which was used for all of the image editing and measuring size, angle, and scale. I used OpenSCAD to write the hand models, frame model, and adjust knob. The cheap dollar store clock movement has a 5.5mm hour hand pinion and a 4mm minute hand pinion, as well as a push on pin for the seconds hand, I would have loved to put seconds in the QNE window, but IMHO using the 10k hand as the second hand while the others didn't move in sync would just irritate me, I might just stick on the red seconds hand from the clock movement or no seconds hand at all. I included a minute hand whic doesn't quite reach the numbers and another longer minute hand which reaches to the edge of the clock face to the individual minutes scale lines.
I also have uploaded an easier to make mod for a cheap quartz alarm clock https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2563867
In theory if printed on stiff paper there is no need for the 3D printed hands if you are skilled with a knife and can trim down the hands that come with the clock movement, then just use contact cement to stick down the painted paper to the trimmed plastic clock hands, I suggest flat white and black paint but if you are at work grab some Whiteout, it should work to paint the hands. The frame can be some spray painted black cut cardboard and probably some spacers and some sort of transparent plastic cover.
The big adjust knob is for now only decoration, but I hope to glue a 40-60mm pulley to the clock adjust wheel on the movement(might have to solder power leads and move the battery as the wheel might block access) on the back of the cheap quartz clock movement and then connect the adjust knob to another pulley and use a rubber band or something similar to link them so the big knob can be used to set the clock.
I decided to model the frame so you can reverse the math like I plan to, and pencil in to wood cut a frame, or if you have a big printer or laser cutter you can just use them with your machine.
I have not printed this yet, but hughee has and it looks great with just the hands and inkjet printed and laminated background. https://www.thingiverse.com/make:344605
You could print everything at about 40%, adjust the hour and minute hand holes back to match the movement, in order to get a more realistic altimeter size for on your desk or bedside. I have been thinking of going through and doing this for a custom travel alarm clock including adding an inline audio amplifier for the alarm tone, always on low level red LED backlight, bright red or white LED torch, and adding a 'bug' marker styled clear disc for setting alarm time. I will probably make that a separate Thingiverse project.
FYI:
The fake calibration window at 3 (or between 2K and 3K on real alt) is where you would read your set QNE, which in a real airplane is adjusted with the big knob at 7:30(6K ft on the real altimeter). QNE is calculated pressure at sea level which the tower or ATC gives you, it is graduated in inHg as a Cessna is an American made airplane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_altitude
It turns out from the picture I took, in the plane I mostly fly, that C172P does have both mBar and inHg but the tower at my airport reads me in inHg so easy to forget the unused left window. In any case I didn't want to also loose the 9 from the face for a mBar scale; this is supposed to be a decorative but still functional and easy to read clock for both adults and children. I have been thinking it might look cool to cut out the QNE(Kollsman) window and put the scale spaced back a bit for more realism, also thinking it would look better with the barber pole stripes wedge cover disc(for below seal level readings at places like the Dead Sea Masada Airstrip in Israel). http://tghaviation.com/aircraft-instrument-services/tag/barber-pole/
The barber pole stripes are so you do not think you are at 10k feet when you are actually flying below sea level, the stripes are visible between 0ft and 10,000 or sometimes up to 16,000 depending on the altimeter.
v1.1 - added a longer pointer minute/x100ft hand model to better match the appearance of the altimeter I am accustomed to.
v1.2 - added a .stl model cover disc and printable PDF for text and cutting template for barber pole stripes wedge disc.