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.

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.

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!

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

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

what a great little design, nice build :)

The internet needs more quality 👌 content like this.

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

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

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!

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.

While i was watching this something random started ticking in the background

You have been blessed by the youtube gods, hope we get to see more great stuff from you in the future.

I think the reason why the main drive gear wasn't damaged is because it is much thicker and stronger than the 40 and especially 8 tooth gear.

Congratulations on a truly spectacular build. 👍