Until this past Friday we had a pretty cool clock hanging on the wall of our catwalk over the family room. The face was composed of a small (about 4″ diameter) round block of wood stained a dark cherry with brushed aluminum bars (about 11″ long) set into it in a sunburst pattern – a bar at 12, 1, 2, 3, 4.. etc all the way around the face.
We had Erica’s birthday party here on Friday, and I guess a dozen 6 year old girls running back and forth across the catwalk was enough to shake the clock right off the wall. 🙁 I wish I had had some sort of recording device going when it hit the ground – the noise it made was sort of a mix between crushing aluminum cans and breaking glass. Very odd.
We were very lucky that there was nobody below the clock when it fell, as it was hung at a height of about 14 feet off the ground – plenty high to do some serious damage to a 6 year old on the way down. Luckily the only damage was to the clock – the center block of wood was completely destroyed, but all the aluminum bars, the arms, and the movement survived.
So, I’m re-building it. The original was pretty flimsy – the center was made of particleboard with a thin veneer on it. My version is solid oak. The center part of the face is about 6″ across, and I’ve inset that onto a larger face background that is about 12″ across or so. The sunburst bars (stolen from the original clock) will overlap the back part of the face and butt up against the smaller main face. I wound up doing 7 coats of poly, with 9 coats on the center face, as I kept marring the finish when I was attaching the metal bars.
Here are a few shots of it mid-construction:
And some shots of the finished clock:
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