Part 1 - Inspiration.
I am a fan of the kinetic sculptures produced by David C. Roy. David produces beautiful wood kinetic sculptures with most of them powered by a watch escapement type of device as a motion power source.
I am planning on creating some modest kinetic sculptures and would like to see if I can also power them using a watch escapement type motion source. Rather then purchasing the motion source I am going to try to fabricate my own and I am going to start by simply fabricating an existing design to learn about it.
The watch escapement desk toy that I am going to fabricate can be found on Thingiverse. This design includes a steel main winding spring rather than a 3D printed plastic spring resulting in a vastly increased run time. The original design with the plastic spring is also on Thingiverse. The original design is very well documented and includes these exploded views of the parts of the mechanism:
Here are a couple of photos showing the original design with a plastic main spring and the new design with the steel main spring:
The second part of this series will cover the fabrication of the Watch Escapement Desk Toy.