In
the centre of Newport, South Wales, stands a 30-foot arch with a clock face on
its pediment; only the trident and dragon's tail tips to the hands hint that
there is more to the stately edifice than there appears.
As the hour strikes, a clap of thunder is heard
from within. A hidden door opens in a pillar, and amid flashes of lightning
the Devil appears in a cloud of smoke, pointing at the clock. As he
vanishes, two concealed hatches under the clock open and out pop grinning
skeletons, waving hourglasses and shaking their heads.
It
is all to remind us of the passing of time and our own mortality.
Then all Hell breaks loose, so to speak. Cracks appear across the pillars and clock, and shuddering and groaning, the six-ton arch falls apart as if by the hand of some invisible Samson, its broken pieces coming to rest at crazy, precarious angles. Inside the pediment, split wide open, a giant cuckoo clock mechanism is revealed. A boiler-suited angel is riding on the swinging pendulum, fluttering his wings, and the two great weights slowly drop down through the opening. Then it all stops.
S
uddenly, a cuckoo appears from the crack in a broken column. He wakes up two angels inside the clock, who spring into action and wind up the weights, and the arch comes together again and snaps shut for another hour, just as if nothing had happened.
The whole pageant is reminiscent of medieval allegorical clocks and a Roland Emmett mechanical animation, not to mention the famous Guinness Clock.
THE MECCANO MODEL
The model was
built to 1:7 scale. The sequence controller, a self-contained unit, housed the
motor and distributed drive to the model's nine functions. Using a separate cam for each action allowed
complete flexibility in both timing and duration and adjustment in situ.
When the camshaft
had
revolved 360
Builder's comment: Like the SLR Camera, the mechanism worked in theory, but not in the real world. It would have needed powerful screw-jack actuators, individual motors and micro switches (possibly an electronic sequencer) and the engineering skill and determination of a Tony Rednall. Unfortunately, the model was taken down before these could be tried.