Clock
The clock consists of four parts machined by me. A 2" tall brass pen holder, a 2" tall steel pencil holder, a tumbled aluminum base, and a plastic clock face with brass pins. The face of the clock is finished off with a battery powered clock mechanism, and brass hands.
Advice for Future Students
When you start the clock project, be aware of the time you have and how to use it. A lot of students see that they have about two months to finish the project, so they get started on it later in the semester. I recommend starting as early as possible, this way, when you run into problems or make a mistake you have plenty of time to work around them. I finished my clock a month early, and earned the highest score in the class (104/105, which is the highest recorded since the project started). I wouldn't have been able to do this had I not used my time wisely.
Cost Estimate
The clock has four machined parts, brass and steel parts of the same size, an aluminum base, and a plastic clock face. The cost of all of these materials is detailed below:
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Brass Part: $2.81 for 2.18"long, 1/2" diameter stock
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Steel Part: $2.79 for 2.18"long, 1/2" diameter stock
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Aluminum Base: $7.95 for ~8", 1/4" thick aluminum stock
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Plastic Face: >$1.00 for the 5"x 8"polycarbonate stock
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Clock Mechanism: $14.95
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Labor: $1400 for approximately 70 hours spent on work total over the course of a month, at $20 an hour
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~30 hours spent​ machining and tumbling the base
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15 hours spent on both the steel and brass pieces
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10 hours spent on the clock face
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Total: $1429.00
Now, that is an expensive clock. If I was going to make 10,000 clocks all by myself, it would cost 14 MILLION dollars! Not only is that an incredible expense, but it would take me almost 80 years to complete all 10,000. This isn't cost effective or efficient.
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Let's estimate the cost again, this time for 10,000 clocks, if they were made not by hand, but by robots in an assembly line.​ To keep it simple, we'll assume that the robots can complete one clock per hour, and it costs $3 per hour to run the robots. That way, it would take the robots exactly 10,000 hours or 1.14 years to complete all the clocks, and it would cost $572,100 total (including the price of the raw stock), or around $57 per clock. That's much cheaper than making them all by hand.
Automating the Clock Manufacturing
Both the brass piece and the steel piece could be machined using a CNC Lathe, with programs written to at least face the parts to their correct length. It could also be used to turn down the part of the bass with the threads. The threading, tapping and drilling of the brass and steel parts could be done with a CNC mill, or could continue to be done by hand.
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The milling of the aluminum base could be done using a CNC mill, and all of the facing and squaring processes could be done by the machine. Any finishing processes of the brass, steel, and aluminum pieces could be done with robotic machines made to do the job. Otherwise, those processes would probably be done best by hand.
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The plastic faces should be done by hand, and since it doesn't take very long to make the face of the clock, this wouldn't impact the length of the manufacturing process that much. A person would only need to cut the top corners using a vertical band saw and round the edges.
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The pins will have to be put in by hand, which is a time consuming process but using machinery might fracture the clock face. A drill press could be automated to make the holes, so long as it is run up and down slowly to prevent the plastic from cracking under the drill pressure.
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Final assembly has to be manual to ensure all parts are put in correctly and the quality of the parts is sufficient. However, the automation of simpler processes like facing, cutting, and drilling, could help cut the manufacturing time down.