Hamburger Sized Pocket Watch

In this Instructable, I will show you how to make an Hamburger sized pocket watch for decorative use. This is the first project I’ve done from scratch and ran into numerous problems but it was a fun experience. I regret not having many photos to share on this submission so I’m sorry if this looks rough. STL files of each part will be uploaded to 3d print or cut out.

• 2 5’x5’ boards of pine wood
• A 5'x8’ sheet of acrylic for the inlay
• Standard PLA plastic
• A quartz clock mechanism
• Ender 3 Pro 3d printer
• Laser cutter
• Laguna CNC router
• A 1/8” drill bit
• A 1/4“drill bit
• 80 grid sandpaper

The original thought of the design was to make a pocket watch but with a quartz clock mechanism meant for a wall clock. Fusion 360 was used to make rough shapes of the hinge and both halves of the watch. The simple design is made from a sphere cut in half and flattening the ends so it resembles a closed-face pocket watch. Wood was the primary material as it would be cut out in a CNC router and the hinge was made with PLA plastic due to the hole being too small to cut out in the router. The top part has an outer ring not so that an inlay could be placed inside and the bottom has a section for the clock mechanism to be placed in as well. Here are the 3 files used for the watch (measurements are in inches).

After going through a journey that was figuring out how to make tool paths for the rounded portions of the clock while keeping the time of the cut below 20 minutes on each half. It eventually came together and the file was able to be exported to the router for cutting. After putting the file on a thumb drive, plugging it into the controller, selecting the file, and setting the origin & Z-height, all that was left was placing the wood in a vice to hold it in place.

The CNC router makes cutting wood into the desired design easy as long as the file used has correctly made tool paths, the cut will be the same every time. All we had to do was watch as it cut out the hinge placement, the hole for the clock mechanism, and the almost hamburger bun-shaped clock halves. Just in case anything would go wrong my partner watched the cut while holding the controller to stop the program.

In a separate file, we had the hinge model made to be 3d printed as the holes were smaller than the drill bit. I exported the file to Cura, a 3d print configuration software, and made it into a .gcode file ready to be printed. Then I took a thumb drive, exported the file to the drive, plugged it into the printer, and started the print. The print took about half an hour including the bed and extruder warm-up times. (Sorry for no video, my phone storage couldn’t take it).

Now with both parts made it was time for assembling the watch. At least that was what I would say if I didn’t have to sand the parts down to smooth them out and help with the clearance fitting. I used an 80 grid piece of sandpaper and went over lightly to make sure that I wouldn’t take off too much material but enough to where it didn’t seem rough

Okay, so now it was actually the time to assemble the watch. I took the hinge apart and placed both parts in each hole made for them in each watch half. Then The inlay for the top piece was shoved in place, followed by the clock mechanism and inlay for the bottom piece. Finally, I put both pieces together using a small wooden rod in the hole of the hinge to give it that nice opening and closing motion.

The assembly went smoothly until something I feared had happened, the arms of the clock mechanism were colliding with the 2nd top part made (the first one was brutally destroyed, see picture above) as it wasn’t cut deep enough. So I thought, “Hey, I have a hand router I can use to fix this,” and that was a bad mistake made. Long story short, the drill bit hit a knot, part jumped, a chunk went flying, and here I was with a broken top piece. So after spending the next half an hour acting as if I had been broken beyond repair, I sucked it up and tried my best to take pictures of the finished project (thankfully it turned out well)