Vinyl Dual-country Clock

I have discovered, while browsing this site, that I have a thing for clocks, and lamps...

So, here's a clock I thought of after going to the thrift store and seeing a bunch of small vinyls for $2.

Materials:

• 4 Vinyls
• 2 clock mechanisms with hands
• Super glue
• Spray paint
• Paper

Tools:

• Circular objects (see step 1)
• Scalpel
• Printer
• Heavy things
• Google

After a few attempts, I found out there was no real way of taking the labels off the vinyls. Therefore I resorted to spray painting the labels black.

In order to be able to keep the vinyl look and gloss, I didn't want to spray the whole vinyl so I had to look for a bunch of different round, or circular objects that would protect the vinyls from the spray paint.

Of course, I could have made something out of plastic, but I found that the router table top tool I used for other projects would work just fine. It was a slightly bigger hole than needed, but whatever.

I placed the vinyls under the router tool, and sprayed.

Note: If you think you're going to save time by using a heat gun to dry the paint, you would be wrong. I was wrong. It bubbles the paint and warps the vinyls. I should have figured it out by remembering the Dali painting...

I tend to have middle of the night wake up calls for no good reason... Seeing as I was n the middle of the making this clock that week, 2AM struck, and I was awake.

I had used google to find images I liked, and printed them off.

I used a flat surface and some tape to make sure my stencils wouldn't slide away as I was cutting the design out with the scalpel.

Note: A round edged scalpel works the best.

Once the shapes were cut out of the paper, I unstuck the papers from the board and stuck them on the vinyls.

Make sure you don't throw out what you cut out as they could be useful later!

After cutting out the stencils, and keeping everything from them.

I stuck the stencils to the vinyls and made sure to get the tape as close to the edge as possible. This ensured that the spray paint would minimally bleed over onto the surface I was trying to keep black.

As this didn't work perfectly, I used the pieces cut out from the stencils, taped them to the gold painted parts, and sprayed the vinyls with black paint to smooth out the edges.

The bottom part of the treble clef, was deliberately left out so the super glue would properly adhere to the the vinyl surface and not the paint. There was no problem on the headphone side as that vinyl was glued above the other vinyl and no paint would interfere with the glue.

I had some vinyl glue lying around from a past project. I tried it out, and it didn't work.

So I pulled the super blue out of the fridge. Dabbed some glue to the parts I wanted glued together and placed some empty bottles over the glued parts to hold them down.

Although the glue is "fast acting", I went to bed, and then proceeded to the following step the next day.

The clock mechanisms I got from klockit.com and assembled them where I wanted them. I got the atomic movements as they sound cool, and cost relatively the same thing as quartz movements.

2AA batteries, a bit of time setting the time, and Voila! The clock is finished, and ready to go up on a wall!