The Dale C. Maley Family Web Site

I found a neat pattern in this book...........the clock is shown on the back cover, just above "Stackpole books"........

I bought the clock movement and hands from Klockit online........

I stayed with the general colors used in the book pattern.  The glass came from various sources, Including the Glass House in Decatur, Illinois, hobby lobby in Bloomington, and Cracked Glass in Urbana, Illinois.

I usually only break 1 piece out of a 50 piece project, but I broke 2 on this one.  Those long and skinny curved pieces break pretty easily.........1 of them had a bubble defect in it, which caused it to break.  You have to accept a piece or two will break, because glass is not a perfectly homogenous material !!

Although this panel is not big enough to really require reinforcement, the fragility of those long skinny curved pieces that I broke..........made me want to reinforce the panel.  I had tried the copper Re-strip on another project, and it worked fine.........so I went ahead and reinforced it.   I used extra thumbtacks to hold the restrip down, it tends to want to pop up without them.

Found mistake in pattern for 2 larger square pieces, that go on outside of clock curve at bottom. They are not wide enough, they need to be 1.75 inches wide.

The book show placing these glass spacers on top of the front........but the height of these spacers is the same as the side and top spacers..........so they need to sit on the same surface as the top is laying on. I cut 2 new spacers 1.75" wide, and everything worked ok.

I ran into an issue soldering on the 12 gauge wire on the inside top, where you eventually hang the clock from. The copper foil worked lose on the 2 curved pieces, because you can not solder then on the inside.

I removed these 2 pieces, and used 1/4" wide versus 7/16" copper foil on these.........then I tinned the 2 pieces before I soldered them to the clock. This worked much better.

The book is not clear where to end the 12 gauge copper wire. I ended up running it on the inside of the sides, and soldering it to the sides.

I am not a fan of just copper foil on an exposed edge, because it is too fragile. I built it up as much as I could by dropping solder drops on top to build it up. It still is not very strong.

I may try hanging the finished clock as a test, then put a blanket below, it case it falls apart. It would be terrible if this clock fell and the pieces broke!!

I am not sure how to support it better.

I had a couple of big cracks. I put masking tape on the back side to keep the solder from flowing through.  Then I cut short pieces of copper wire to fill the crack, then solder it........which worked well.

This was a fun project.  I am not very good at picking out color combinations, so I went with the pattern books colors...........and I think they turned out great.  If I make another one, I might think about using U-lead on the back of the sides, because it is so much more robust than built up copper foil.