Clock making the old fashioned way

Tom Del Rosso squeezed out:

"Old time" did not necessarily mean without tools.. There are many good books on the subject of tools.

Check out this guys rather traditional approach. I had a great talk with him recently at the Estevan Model Engineers show. His fusee cutting engine is amazing. Very traditional skill set.. heh

Jerry was a ton of fun as well. He was cutting balance staffs on a Sherline lathe... or at least claiming to. He handed me a demo he had done many of for Sherline events that was claimed to be a 3/4" shaft cut in six passes down to .009" then drilled a .005" hole in the end.. All that struck me when I was looking at it was that he nailed the hole dead centre.. eheh very nice workmanship.

For the time being, all these links and more can be accessed via

Cheers! Ian.

On my site I have a series of pics showing the process of making new wheels and pinions.

However, in the very early days, the wheel was divided with a slotting saw and then the teeth were *filed* in a jig using a file with the tooth profile. Kind of like the setup used in filing a chain saw.

From there it went to "rounding up" cutters. These cutters (still useful today) work like a circular file. I still fine it hard to believe that they were made. The wheel is profiled to the tooth shape. Also, the thickness of the wheel starts thin and gradually comes to full thickness. The sides of the wheel (on the profile) are milled to provide a filing action as the rounding up cutter spins in the slot on the wheel blank. To top it off, the cutters have an attachment to catch the next tooth and automatically index it into position.

This was the process used to make many Swiss music box gears and watch gears in the early 19th century. When I have an oddball wheel for which I don't have a cutter, I use this method.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, this tool was used to reduce the wheel diameter and putting a proper shape on the teeth. Hence the name "topping tool". Some people think it can be used to correct a decentered wheel. However, this is not true. When used on a decentered wheel, the teeth thicknesses are not uniform. Rounding up refers to rounding the tooth tips.

Wow, that's impressive, Dewey. Do you make the files or the rounding-up cutters, or are those available commercially?

Ed Huntress

For some reason a reply to your post was not loading. Ed,

If you know what you are looking for, the rounding up cutters and rounding up tools can be found. Thank God I found mine before sellers found eBay. The cutters are marked in 100ths of a module and I have a complete set through 60 and some to 1.0. Its like everything else, when it is your business you seek out what you need to have.

However, I don't think the cutters have been made since the 1940s. Luckily, the vast majority of watchmakers who owned such tools knew what they were and so did their families. So a number survive in good shape.

How in the world they made those cutters is a mystery to me. Was a lot more work than making a modern mutitoothed profile gear cutter.