Making a clock hand

I have been building a small engraving/CNC machine in my cellar at home and intend to use it for jewellery applications. As it happens the first job which would benefit from the use of such a machine was to create the missing hand for a wall clock. The clock is oversize and so the hand is approx 140mm long with an antiqued gold finish. I intended to cut the hand out of aluminium with a fine milling bit but even using the smallest I could get (1.2mm) I would not be able to cut the finer parts of the piece and using a pointed carborundum cutting tool of approx 30 degrees seemed to chew up the edges of the thin aluminium sheet (0.5mm). Using Autocad 97 lite I drew a longer version of hour hand which I had already and printed it out as you can see above. This was no mean feat as I have never used Autocad before so it took a while to learn how to use it.


Next I used imported the image into Lazycam and used Mach3 to engrave the image onto the aluminium using a non rotating tungsten carbide scriber bit mounted in my spindle.

Then back to old tech to hand cut the hand along the scribed lines, it didnt take long so with a bit of filing up it was done.

Finally after putting the hand longways in the vice and putting a slight bend along its length for rigidity, I spray painted in gold and black and bolted it on!