[time-nuts] pneumatically synchronized clocks

Russell Rezaian rrezaian at motorola.com
Wed Mar 11 15:26:28 UTC 2009


Hi Bill,

Fascinating subject here, thank you for the summaries of your research!

You can sometimes find the slave clocks for the US pneumatic systems. 
There's one on eBay now.  Made by Hahl, not sure what shape its in, 
but the pictures don't look bad.

I'm not sure what kind of pressure you'd need to operate one of 
these, but I suspect you could probably rig some sort of impeller 
system by using a small electrical solenoid pneumatic valve hooked to 
a compressed air source.  From some simple research these valves seem 
to be fairly easy to find and not too expensive.

If anyone has a circuit or gizmo for driving an electro-mechanical 
slave clock from a disciplined time source that could probably be 
used more or less with no modification to drive the relay for the 
pneumatic valve as easily as the relay on the other style slave clock.

One would probably want to include some sort of air filter/pressure 
regulator assembly too.  I suspect the filter/pressure regulator 
systems sold for use with artists air brush systems might work, and 
those can often be found cheaply.

Looking at the size of the piston assembly on the clock it might be 
possible to run one of these from canned air without needing to use a 
compressor, but replacing the canned air might be a pain.  Again one 
of the small air compressor systems sold for airbrushes might work 
well.

Sounds like this might actually be a fun project!
--
Russell

At 10:52 PM -0500 2009/03/10, Bill Hawkins wrote:
>Would like to see one of those pneumatic clocks. If I owned one, I'd
>build a GPS disciplined pneumatic oscillator for it.




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