Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This was, for me, an incredibly interesting and only occasionally frustrating kit to assemble. I’m happy to recommend it, although I strongly advise reading some reviews and watching some videos before you buy it or try to assemble it. Difficulty level is tricky to assess: on the one hand, the parts are all pre-cut--everything--you don’t even have to cut dowel rods to size, and the only finishing work is to sand down any burrs and rub wax on a few surfaces. But--the parts are in many cases very delicate, and the gear assemblies have to be done JUST RIGHT or it simply will not work. There is no glue, no nails, no screws--everything slides and snaps together and is secured by friction and tension. This has advantages and disadvantages. You can carefully pry things apart with a small screwdriver if you realize you put a gear on the wrong way (Not that this happened to me! And certainly not twice!), but to fully engage the locking tabs on the wooden pieces, you have to apply considerable pressure. That brings me to my first, vital tip: think *carefully* about what you are pressing on, and how you might knock other parts out of alignment if you press too hard. These are wooden pieces; they can break. Press from the center of gears, not the edges. You will put lots of plastic washers on the metal rods that hold the gears, at very exact distances. Be careful not to push them out of position as you assemble the clock. I ended up mashing two of my gear assemblies a bit as I built the frame around them, moving the spacers and suddenly throwing everything out of alignment. It wasn’t the end of the world, but I had to carefully remove the gears, get the washers off, and re-seat them to specifications. There’s tip two: check your work as you go. Once you get to final assembly, every gear you add should turn freely without falling out of it’s slot, and gears should mesh together without jamming or skipping. Enjoy watching the clockwork come together gear by gear--it’s a fascinating process--and stop, check your work, and back up if something doesn’t seem right. Removing the wooden parts from the sheets they come in should be done slowly and carefully. Do not try to force anything. Work your way around parts, wiggling them a bit at a time until they work free. Don’t remove a part until you need it--much simpler that way. You can use the little bit of sandpaper that comes in the kit to smooth out any burrs on the pieces (and yes, the sandpaper provided was enough for me), but be careful here: don’t sand down the edges of joints, or they may not stick firmly in place when assembled. You may find that some of the gears or other parts are a bit warped. If so, they can be pressed between two boards for a day or two. I had a slightly warped gear, but it hasn’t stopped the clock from running so far--I wouldn’t have minded taking the time to straighten it, however. There are extras for a number of parts, in case you break or lose them. Often, but not always, the extras are surrounded by a dashed line on the parts sheets. Now, the instructions. Well, good points and bad. There are no words once you get past the first page, and in a couple of places, I sure would have appreciated some. Think IKEA furniture, and if that thought gives you a shudder of dread, maybe this isn't the model for you (Me, I like IKEA!). The illustrations are super-detailed and generally very high quality. Take the time to understand what each instruction is calling for. You can look ahead, look back, put it down for an hour and go for a walk, whatever, but don’t try to charge through this thing. Inspect the parts and carefully line them up with the illustrations, looking at the positions of holes, markings, clockwise vs. counter clockwise, etc. In lots of places, there are little exclamation marks to call your attention to details that are easy to overlook, or illustrations of correct vs. incorrect assembly. These are all absolutely critical. Pay particular attention to the side views of the completed gears, which show relative positioning of the parts including the washers on each axle. I’ll go through the instructions page by page and call out a few things that I would have liked to be clearer. On page 3, you start by assembling some little spacing templates called T1-1, T2-1, and T-3. There will be more of these--you get to T1-2 and all the way to T2-8 in the fullness of time. These are the spacing templates used to seat the washers on the gear axles at exactly the right distances--they don’t get built into the final clock! Keep them around, I guess, if you ever need to fix one of the gears later. The bottom half of page 3 is simply a set of illustration of *how* the tools are used in later steps--it’s not telling you to actually *do* anything with them yet. There is a little plastic spacing tool in one of the parts bag that is called P19 on the parts manifest, but is referred to as T5 for the rest of the instructions. It’s tiny--don’t lose it! Step 5 calls for waxing the teeth of a gear. The kit originally included a small tub of wax, but evidently this has been removed owing to some kind of international shipping issue. I’m disappointed that there is not a word about this in the kit. You don’t need anything fancy for this--people have used birthday candles, scented air freshener candles, and all kinds of things. I used a combination of birthday candles and some scented wax cubes from the local big-box store, rubbing between the teeth with the candles and then running the gear over the wax cubes, then smoothing things out and scraping off any excess. I actually waxed all of my gear surfaces, not just the couple that the instructions called for. I don’t know whether that improves the clock or not, but it wasn’t any great trouble. In Step 8, the hour hand mechanism can be a bit troublesome. I found the gear wheel was just too tight against the semicircular base piece, so I applied some sandpaper to the base where it was contacting to wear it down a bit. Also, the ring that indicates the hours is not held on tightly and tends to fall off. Well, let it: it gets in the way during assembly anyway. Put it on at the very end and touch it with some glue if you want to. In Step 12, be careful to note the configuration of the pendulum pieces. The two arms on the part at the top are *different*, and one is marked with arrows. If you put it on backwards, the clock will run for three or four “ticks” before stopping (you see a lot of reviews where this happened to people, and I have to wonder how many of them, like me, put the pendulum together incorrectly). In Step 15, touch the dowel rods with the sandpaper if they will not fit the holes--but not too much, as you want the joints to be tight once assembled. From Step 18, as you assemble the frame, be very careful where you apply pressure (I mentioned this earlier) Start from the bottom of the clock and work slowly. Avoid putting any pressure on the gear assemblies, or you may knock the washers out of position. And don’t worry too much if you do--you can carefully work the gears out the bottom of the clock frame and re-align them if need be. You can wind the spring up and let the clock mechanism go before you put the pendulum in, but be careful--it will go *very* fast without the pendulum to regulate the speed of the mechanism. Just wind a quarter turn or so to make sure everything is aligned and engaged. If the gears and the hands aren’t turning, stop and check your work--the pendulum only regulates the speed of the mechanism; it won’t make it work if it’s not working already. At the end, the pendulum will need to be gently convinced to fit through a gap between frame supports that is a little snug. I hope it goes beautifully for you! As I mentioned, I had a bit of the pendulum on backwards, so I was only able to get a handful of ticks out of it at first. Once I fixed that (using a small screwdriver to pry things apart, very slowly, very carefully, a millimeter at a time, working around and around the parts), everything worked as well as could be desired. I get about six hours out of a full wind, and the time is accurate within one minute in four hours at the moment. I haven’t tried adjusting the pendulum yet to improve this. I’ve no idea how long it will last before something breaks or wears out, and I doubt it would survive being boxed up and moved, but I had a great time building it, learned a lot, and I’m enjoying letting it tick away on my shelf for as long as it lasts. Last tip: head out to YouTube and search for Rokr Clock--you’ll find a lot of useful videos with more pointers.