Not all clock plans make it for sale on my website. This is the story of Pi.
Above: Monotonous Pi 3D Renderings made from my dxfs
by my friend, Oleg in Russia
Below: Pi, actually built by me, in motion below:
The Monotonous Pi is a kinetic sculpture posing as a clock. It has all the parts of both a clock and a kinetic sculpture. That huge circular pendulum has a very slow forward and back oscillation of approximately 38 beats a minute.
Monotonous Pi has its roots in the Medieval 1300’s when the verge and foliot clocks were the techie’s state of the art timepieces. They weren’t very accurate. They could be off twenty minutes a day…plus or minus. That’s a pretty huge possible error spread, and that error rate in timekeeping, with only slight improvements, continued until the late 1600’s when the seconds pendulum was introduced by Galileo and others - like Christiaan Huygens (who, in my opinion, never gets enough credit).
But not all verge and folio clocks had such problems with accuracy. Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) had a suggestion that I’ve incorporated into all of my verge and folio clock designs (except Monotonous Pi), and they are actually quite accurate timekeepers.
Huygens recommended a return spring on the verge to increase the clock’s accuracy. My designs, other than Pi, have just such a return spring which is created by the spread of the cord from which the verge and foliot is suspended. Most verge and foliots in those early days were suspended by a single strand of silk. By changing over to a loop of cord we can add that return spring advantage to our verge and foliot clocks that Huygens suggested, and this simple improvement increases their accuracy dramatically. You can see that loop of cord suspending the verge and foliot in my Medieval Rack, Holologium, and Wee Willie designs.
But…Monotonous Pi is not one with a looped suspension cord or return spring, so its accuracy is very similar to the workings of those early Medieval clocks - which is not very good…but sometimes it’s right! However, on the other hand, as a kinetic sculpture the Monotonous Pi is excellent! Pi is a visual delight.
It is lovely to watch Pi’s slow oscillating movement forward and back. And it does try so hard to keep good time, even though it’s not very good at it. Still…Monotonous Pi is one of my favorite sculptures. Pi is truly a delight to watch.
Aloha, Clayton
