Build a real hard drive clock

The head for four discs has a nice smooth bottom which was very suitable to glue the hour hand on. It’s important to use the upper or lower side depending on what looks best from above, we want to see as much of the electronics from the viewing angle and as this arm only has one head for the lower side of the disc. What we want to do here is to let the hour hand be fixed to the arm and then attach the minute hand through the hole and attach it to the inner side of the bearing. The inner side of the bearing will then be attached to the bearing of the minute hand arm. Leave the bearing in place as this makes it so much easier to centre the hour hand when gluing, but don’t glue to hand to bearing.

Now take out the bearing and cut out the centre of the minute hand and glue it into place. And oh, forgot to tell you - I’m using super glue when gluing this. Works very well but you have to be quick when putting the details into place as it dries in about 2-3 seconds.

The best way of attaching the two bearings together is of course to use a bolt in-between them, but the problem I got into here is that the upper thread is metric and the bottom one is UNC. The solution of course is glue. We can’t use superglue here as we’re gluing stainless steel to stainless steel so here I’m using a two component epoxy. First I screwed a screw into the upper part and then cut off the head.

Then I smeared the epoxy in a thin layer on the bottom of the minute bearing and inside the threads of it. It really has to be thin as you only want to lock the upper bearing (so that it can’t rotate) but don’t get anything between the inner and outer part of the hour bearing.

9 Responses to “Build a real hard drive clock”

1. MAKE: Blog Says:
   December 9th, 2005 at 18:54

   HOW TO - Build a real hard drive clock

   Chris writes in about his his progress on hacking away with 20 hard drives, he writes “In part 3 of “Things to do with 20 hard drives” we take a look on how to build The real hard drive clock, using the arms with heads as hands. Even though this clo…

2. Dave W Says:
   December 9th, 2005 at 21:26

   How about a walking robot. Just use the Arms to cylce around in circles. You can create either a six or four leg model. You could also ad some basic remote control system to it.

   If you were really adventerous you could also use two arms and create a joint in each of the legs.

3. Grassynoel Says:
   December 11th, 2005 at 17:16

   How about using three running hard drives as a clock? With three HDs, each with their own controller and driver software, you could maybe get the arms to tick like second, minute and hour hands.

4. sry Says:
   December 18th, 2005 at 15:59

   You can build an computer case

5. Alan Says:
   December 19th, 2005 at 6:24

   Great idea. Looks 10 times better than simply sticking a few clock hands on it!

6. Jeremy.... Says:
   December 25th, 2005 at 16:17

   J….
   Where ya been? Every email address i have for you keeps coming back to me, where u at? Write me, its Cat from Chicago… UIMs ex…..
   Cat

7. Kyle Says:
   March 17th, 2006 at 21:47

   The huge hands take away from the good look. You should try to seperate the r/w arms to make them a little thinner!

8. sygyzy Says:
   January 7th, 2007 at 22:47

   Do you think a clock mechanism from a hobby store would be strong enough to move those arms?

9. Lucan Perpete Says:
   March 31st, 2007 at 22:52

   Is there any way to make the glowing (mountable LED with switch that control light on and off) and the acrylic case to cover and hold the Real Hard Drive Clock in the place.

   Any Suggestion?

Leave a Reply