Mr. Clock Face

     For Christmas this year I built a unique and very cool little man that I call Mr. Clock Face. He's a simple wire man with a useful clock head and aligator clip hands. This Instructable shall explain how I built him.

     For another awesome project suitable for any one with a keen interest for the imaginative, visit my other Instructable www.instructables.com/id/Cardboard-Jacobs-Ladder-Tumbling-Gorillas/.

Edit: My step mum absolutely loves him and gave me an extra heaping of ice cream for dessert, so I'm extremely happy with this, even if you're not. If you make this than be prepared for the thank you's from who ever you make it for (yourself?) because I certainly wasn't prepared for the lot that I got. Please, don't forget to comment and / or rate!

To make this wonderful little resident for my step mum's bedside table, I used:

Tools:

• Pencil or Dowel with Similar Width to a Pencil
• Drill
• Drill Bits of Assorted Sizes
• Super Glue
• Pliers
• Scissors

Expendables:

• 20-30 meters of 1.25 mm Wire
• An Average 4" x 2" Piece of Wooden Block
• 2 x Alligator Clips
• 1 x Small Round Clock
• 1 x Tissue Box
• 15 x Tissues
• Wrapping paper

 A couple notes on the above items:

2.5 cm is 1 inch. (1")

My wire was just a 30 meter roll of tie wire.

A good friend of mine recommends that you don't glue your fingers together with the super glue.

My "Small Round Clock" is an analog alarm clock that's approximately 3-4 cm round and 2.5 cm deep.

     Leaving and roughly 2cm I started to wind my wire around the dowel that I had from a previous expedition of making.  Later on I learned that 2cm was not long enough for a foot and uncurled the bottom bit until I had 4cm. Keeping in sync with my original plan, I wound up 6.5cm from the start of the spiral and pulled the dowel out from the now spring-like leg.

     I bent the large piece of trailing wire at a  90º and left a straight section the same length as my first leg untouched. I then started spiraling back upwards, with the straight bit on the inside of the coil, hidden away from view.

     Pulling the dowel out of the wire is quite hard at this part, but if you twist the correct way and pull firmly then it comes out with only a tad of frustration.

     A depiction of all that has occurred in the preceding sentences are now below in a user friendly, eye comprehensible format.

     For the main torso I spiraled upwards directly away from the legs for 4cm. I also added knees (A.K.A. small bends) into the legs. I just pushed the torso back in line with the legs so it doesn't look weird.

     At about this stage you should be able to work out if your springy body will hold up the clock head or not, if not, then I'll show you how to add structural support later. If you don't, then Mr. Clock Head gets angry at you for making him so weak, and gets all of his clock  buddies to turn off their alarm so you get up late in the morning. Mr. Clock Head doesn't get angry; he gets even.

     From the body, I bent the wire at a 90º outwards again, parallel with the legs. I Folded it back on itself the same distance away from the body as it is from the top of the torso to the waist.

     Of course, he needs hands so feeling generous I left  half a centimeter before coiling back towards the body, with that strait bit of wire on the inside of the coil. Then, I coiled out the other side of the body for the same distance and then cut the wire off the roll about a meter away from the end of the arm.

Whoo! That's the main body basically done!

     To make sure that the whole thing doesn't flop over and die a gruesome death, I thought it useful to make sure that the whole thing was just a tad stronger than it was there and then. So I got the meter long bit of wire hanging off one arm and fed it back through, down the torso, into one leg, round the foot, back up, down the other leg, around the foot, and back up so it poked up where the neck should be.

      The one thing that stop Mr. Clock Face from ruling our world is the also simple fact that he doesn't have thumbs, but he makes up for this with his amazin alligator clips hands.

     At the rear end of an alligator clip it's got two triangular flaps that can be folded down around what ever you want to join it onto. Where the hands I made stuck out, I just folded these two triangle flap things down, and then the bottom half of the hand back up over it to make it structurally sound before super glued in place.

     "Why not solder?" you might say, but because your average alligator clip is chrome covered, it makes it a considerable amount more difficult to solder onto.

     Of course, no humanoid project would be complete without a head. Now, try not to lose yours and follow along closely to what I did.

      I found a spice jar which was thinner than the width of the clock I had, and wrapped the rest of the wire hanging out of the top of Mr. Clock Face's neck around it tightly. This then loosens by itself a fair amount, just enough for me to put the clock into the spiral. I cut off the excess, and then glued the clock into the coil of wire, and let it set.

     Sometimes, a man needs to stand up to the wearisome troubles of this world, which is what Mr. Clock Face must do now.

      I got a piece of 4" x 2", a standard piece of wood that any good maker should have sitting on his windowsill, and worked on from there. I started off with a rough 3d trapezium shape, with the top wide enough to hold Mr. Clock Face's stance. I drilled two holes in the top so his "feet" could slide in, and then glued him in place. Because of the un-aesthetically pleasing eyesore that this wiry man is now standing on is an un-aesthetically pleasing eyesore, I sanded it back just a little to get rid of some nasty markings, rounded the corners and made the bottom more or less at a right angle with the front and back.

    I wasn't planning on making this into an Instructable so I did not document everything, I therefore apolagise for the lack of images in this step but I hope my explenation was enough.

     I found that a tissue box was just the right size, so I cut the bottom half off and wrapped it in wrapping paper to hide what it was, stuffed it with tissues and placed Mr. Clock Face inside. I put the instructions for the clock in his hand and popped the lid on.

     I'm extremely pleased with the end result, I know there's more I could have done, but not before Christmas day (2009).