Geo-Junk Clock Project

Many years back I got an awesome gift from Agmorion and Siun-Kelan. That's it there in the pic on the left. It's a clock made primarily from a bunch of junk like old typewriter keys, a music box that plays "If I Only Had a Brain" while rotating a model of the Space Shuttle, parts of old TVs, etc. I think they said they picked it up at a big craft fair in Pennsylvania. I love it.

The artist's name is Richard Birkett.  Check him out - he’s got some great stuff.

Anyway, my boy recently noticed it in the media room (it was formerly out of his view in my office) said he thought it was cool and he asked if we could build one like it.  I said sure, so he went off happy and I began hashing out a strategy for how to make this happen. 

The clock in his room was a Cars II themed thing. Theoretically it was great for a kid's room but practically it was useless. The design of the clock face backing is waaaayyy too busy and it makes reading the thing at distances greater than four feet or so a challenge. It needed to be replaced so he can actually use it to, you know, tell time.  Right now all it does well is occupy space and drain a double-A battery very, very slowly.

For many months now I have been taking the stuff I have collected from my Geocaching trades, cleaning them, and shoving them in a junk drawer in the kitchen after showing them off to my boy.  BTW, when I do so, he is either a) genuinely excited to see the new stuff or b) he has learned to fake it well enough to fool me - either way I am taking that as a “win”.  

That was really the extent of my plan with those things...  Well, time to put them to good use.  

A dollar store clock and a piece of pine scrap from my workshop formed the basis for this project.  Removing the clock’s face, hands, and mechanism was a simple matter as was cutting and Kreg-tooling and band-sawing the wood into the size I wanted for his wall.  I added a top shelf, a bottom shelf, and a few “middle” shelves out of the leftovers.

I painted the wood with an antique white I still had from when I built my wife’s printer stand and her paper caddy, and fronted the shelves with the same blue his bedroom walls are.

I was planning to use the original clock face but it was firmly glued in place on the plastic housing. Instead, I used it as a template for determining the location of the numbers and dashes.  The mechanism was flush-mounted and covered with a circle cut from a manila folder painted to match the color of the clock.  The hands were replaced, a battery was put in, and there you go - all ready for the main event.

The four-year-old decided where each of the things went on the clock and my job was to hot glue them in place. We had a blast doing that this morning after breakfast. On the left is the “final” product.

Oh... I should mention I was careful to make sure the mounting hardware on the back of the clock was robust enough to handle the eventual addition of stuff I find in future caches.  You see, since one of the points of this clock is to continually add stuff I find while Geocaching it is going to get heavier and heavier until there is literally no room for stuff at all. He loves it, the wife loves it, and I love it.  For some reason it reminds me of a pic I saw when I was a kid in my father’s 1976 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, somehow...

I will (probably) post updated pics as time wears on and the clock gets more and more ornate.  Stay tuned.