Christmas gifts

Christmas will be here soon so I decided to get started on gifts for all my friends now.  These letters started life out as scrap from an architecture class project.  I had to do some cutting to remake a couple of the letters but the eventual goal is to detail each letter and put it into a matted frame for each of my closest friends.

Tire clock refurbish

Another project from the past (not much happening right now since I'm getting settled back into school).  I found this clock in a gift shop on the discount rack, someone had bought it, taken it apart and kept some pieces and returned it to the store.  When I got it it was missing all three hands, a face and the clock mechanism itself, I think it cost about 5 bucks.  It still had the rim, tire and neon ring which you'll see later.  My next step was to buy a cheap clock at Walmart which ran me around $7.


I decided not to use both hands as they were and instead use the brake disk as the hour hand, to do this I unscrewed it from the base and cut the ring off of it with a razor saw then ground down the remnant with my Dremel tool.

The minute hand was too long so it got cut and sanded down.  The hour hand got cut away from the ring and discarded, the ring that attaches to the clock stem was beveled to fit into the hole in the brake disk then was epoxied into place, I put a simple red mark on the disk to denote the "hour hand".

The clock mechanism, though the same size, didn't have the correct mounting points so I had to improvise.  Also, since the stem was too short I had to set it back slightly so the hands would turn behind the rim instead of in front like the original clock.  In order for the hour hand to not rub the base the spacing had to be very exact, I achieved this by sanding down the strips that held it in place.

 There were numerous pegs and screw holed that had to be sanded down so they wouldn't interfere with the clocks opperation

 The previously silver brake caliper was painted red to stand out and I made spacers to hold it above the rotating brake disk.  It blocks the red hour hand tick for a couple of hours but I don't necessarily use this clock to tell time.  Finally, I got on Photoshop and made a clock face that would adequately glow under the neon ring.

Here is the final product once I got all of the quirks worked out of it.  Sorry, the cord that I use to power the neon ring also runs a battery charger and they both got lost in the move, I'll post a pic of the lit clock later.