Fight the Future by qwerty uiop, Sean Mahan
January 15th, 2008 9:14 PM / Location: 37.77387,-122.4318This provoked a series of experiments including:
* completely disassembling multiple clocks
* detaching wires and soldering them back in different locations (FAIL)
* putting the battery in backwards (FAIL)
* drilling holes in small sheets of iron (leads to success)
* removing a piece of metal, flipping it counterclockwise and reinserting it into the clockwork (SUCCESS)
This last, seemingly magic maneuver reversed the clock's position with respect to the magnetic poles of the Earth (or something). Afterwards the clock went backwards.
See videos for proof of date.
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Gosh Sean, got the alluring "I'm just minding my own business" look and everything.
Swanky music.
I love how instead of physically destroying it, you went for the low blow and mangled its career.
wait. since you gave it a new face, how do we know you didn't just flip it upside down?
naw, i'm just shittin you, I know how circles work. sheeeesh.
Clockwise doesn´t care about up or down.
Isn´t that clockwisdom?
If you flip the motion upside down and remount the hands, you essentially get a mirror image of clockwise - aka counterclockwise.
Ah, flip! I didn´t read flip. I thought turn. Duh.
no I meant the clock face. (I suggest you look closer at my comment). Though I think herr Harmon has it right, if you're flipping the motion and remounting, that might do it.
If you just rotate the guts of the clock relative to the outer shell those bell things are mounted to, that won't switch the direction - regardless of what axis you do it through. You have to get *something* mirror-imaged from how it normally is, which in practice means you're gonna have to remount the hands.
here's what we did:
1. took clock apart
2. reversed direction of gears
3. put clock back together again
we flipped over one piece of the internals to reverse the gears and pasted a new face over the old one, otherwise the clock is the same as it ever was.Same as it ever was...same as it ever was...same as it ever was...Same as it ever was...same as it ever was...same as it ever was...Same as it ever was...same as it ever was...
Reversing the batteries won't work, unless the timing is mechanical (and quite possibly not even then). In this case, it's a quartz crystal (the small metal cylinder in the pictured labeled 'failed wiring', over the orange blob)-- way cheaper. You could probably reverse the wiring on the motor itself, leaving the timing circuit untouched, though.
Modern electronics just don't work with the voltage backwards... That tends to include anything with transistors. (A small number of exceptions I've seen have diodes at the input so they work with either polarity power, but that's rare.)
Burn, I'm glad you know that
flipping the clock face would do nothing to the motion.I was worried for a second there.
Suzy,Have more faith in yourself;
you were right.
Doktor,
All you'd have done is turned the clock to face the wall. The spindle would be on the wrong side of the mechanism to be able to read the hands no matter how you have mounted them.nothing to add.
LP, you're such a geek.
Susy, you were right.
BU, Yay for invisible text.
And here I thought the videos were all just run in reverse, much like this or more appropriately; this.
Lincoln, look closer - Strange Glue isn't in reverse. The effort:expectation ratio is much much higher than mere post production tinkering.
*edit* I don't think these video are backwards either.
Lincoln: even more appropriately, there's this video also.
Meta: it depends a lot on the details. Something has to come apart and be reassembled in a way that is the mirror image of its original version.
Meta: Yes I know how Charlie worked his magic, I just meant that what we were seeing wasn't what we were seeing.
But I can't tell if these guys did that here. I would assume not, but that was my first instinct.
Harmon: You mean more appropriately this video.
Well, as a mad scientist myself I have to be more impressed at least by the title of the Coldplay one.
It's true, Lincoln, I admit it. But, as they say, I have not yet begun to fight :) I don't keep foot-crushingly heavy power supplies around for no good reason.
Meta, if you assume that the shaft runs through the center of the clock and out the back, and flip the internals and mount the hands on what was the back of the shaft, you'd have reversed the motion. Of course, with a clock with two hands, that's unlikely to be the case.
How many clocks have you seen that have a shaft sticking out the back?
Several. None of them have both parts of the shaft for the two hands sticking out, just the central part.
One of them only has an hour hand, though -- it's a neat wooden clock with all the internals exposed that my grandparents have had for as long as I can remember. I think it would be pretty trivial to reverse in this manner, not that I'd want to mess with it.
mink, seriously, thanks for the hint but look closer or something
Thanks, Lincoln!
Sam's explanation always sufficed for me.
What has become of this beautiful clock?
I wish my clocks would run backwards. I also wish I had something more intelligent to add.
time. Who knows what'll happen now that you've reversed