The story begins a long time ago, when I first start to think about wood and woodworking, and I decided that I would have made 'something' out of wood. After a few days of thinking, I chose a clock for my first try. Obviously what i had in mind was to buy a clock mechanism and mount it on a wood support that I would have made. This is the origin of my first wood project and of my first clock.
Even tough I was in some way satisfied of the result, I had bought the mechanism and that was disturbing. It wasn't something I had wholly made all alone. So I started to think I could have build the wheels and all the mechanism, to have something that was entirelly made by myself. At this point came the problems: How do you build a clock? How do you design the teeth profile of the gears? What about the escapement? And how do you define the pendulum lenght?
Thanks to the net, I found a lot of interesting documents that helped me in the process of designing a working clock. For instance http://www.ul.ie/~nolk/gears.htm where you can find helpful information on gears, or Mark Headrick site, where you can find wonderful animation of various escapent systems. When I was in the designing phase, I found Clayton Boyer site. In some way his works descouraged me, knowing that I was a long way to obtain results like those, but on the other way that gave me the will to try hard to design my own clock.
Fortunately, my job gave me the right instruments to design and verify all the mechanism (I am a sunglasses designer and so I have a great familiarity with 3D design software) . Thanks to computer technology I spared myself a lot of time on trials on different escapement systems and gears, because I tested them on my computer.