LEGO Pendulum clock: can a LEGO clock run for a whole year?

Now this is what I'm looking for on my reccomend. Awesome

The wear can be heavily reduced by using lubricant. I recommend PTFE lubricant for your use case. It essentially doubles both as a protective coating and lubricant on LEGO parts. I personally use it on my vehicle MOCs. Should aid in the longevity of the parts. Simply buy a $4ish can of lubricant, reapply every month or so, and you’re good to go!

Oh, okay. You meant can Lego clock work for a year. Here I thought you made it run a whole year with a single windup and was ready to call bullshit on that one.

Unlike most things with a question in the title, where the answer is no, you immediately answered in the positive and then went into more interesting content instead of leading up to a failure or disappointment. Bravo!

Great design and interesting insight on the parts wear.Thin bushings seem to disintegrate on their own, even without any substantial forces. As for pallets, there is no easy solution for their wear, apart from using grasshopper escapement (which pretty much eliminates contact friction).

6:25 I'm fairly certain that piece would have disintegrated like that because the axel it's on is under the most torque (the weight pulling down on one side of the ratchet vs the gear holding it in place on the other side). Unfortunately the 1/2 sized bearings are quite fragile and when you twist the axle inside them, that leads to increased size of the axle, thus pushing outward against the bearing - resulting in cracks along the outside edge, and a stretching/'loosening' of the bearing itself, which is why it slid freely along the axle.

That is a beautifully well-tuned escapement! Thank you for the detailed view of the mechanisms. As for the parts wearing down and breaking, perhaps you could use a 3D printing service like 3DHubs to print metal clones of the parts that wear the quickest.

congrats on your success! it's quite an elaborate piece. i have a new knife edge design you might like: 57585 (axle connector hub with three axles) against 92946 (slope brick). the 120 degree angle between the axles of the connector provides the pivot point. compact and most efficient. KEvron

Clocks often wear most on the 3rd wheel, at least that's the one I have to re-bush most often.

can you put a chime that rings every hour and half hour that rings hours on it

The internet needs more quality 👌 content like this.

After seeing this I think I have figured out why our clock has 2 weights. Our clock has chimes, so I think that it uses one weight for the time, and when the time is at a certain spot it triggers something in the clock which activates the chime mechanism which is powered by the second weight. Our clock sometimes stops randomly, and it has been running for almost 30 years. I think the same parts where the pendulum has contact with a gear is worn out after all this time. This has been a really interesting video to watch. Thanks for sharing!

what a great little design, nice build :)

get some brass bearing and silicone based lube and service will be every 3rd year ^^ maybe get some of the gears made out of aluminium or brass too to reduce wear and tear of the most hard pressed points. 10/10 video, now to find all my old lego again

I've used that one-way clutch as well in some of my builds. Amazing clockwork!

I think the reason your seeing wear and tear in areas you don’t expect, like the bushing near the main drive gear, and not in areas that have a lot off weight on them, is the high weight area’s aren’t moving that fast, or that often. Where as the low weight area’s are moving fairly often and relatively fast.

This would be one of the greatest innovation a man could do

Wow, a good study of the effects of continuous use of the mechanical Lego parts. Apparently the Legos worth the price tag, I'm also impressed too. If you want to improve this design, and have a longer lasting clock, then you should replace all moving parts with metal parts. This should drastically improve the lifetime, and the weight. A case for the mechanical parts will help prevent damage from any accidents. This video was surprisingly educational and intriguing, and I praise it for that.

Those tiny bushing/pulleys (the 1 stud size) will over stress and break in a plus sign when there is too much force on them. They will literally twist themselves out of existence if they are crushed side to side while turning. The only thing I've found to fix that is to either over grease the axle where it goes in the hole, or to brace the bushing with a leather washer, because it's the friction against the hole that causes the tear out.

This felt so much like an AvE video I was expecting you to say "plastique" and curse at the camera for not focusing!