Hello, today after testing the project, we unfortunately realized that it doesn't hold up properly. In fact, for the project to work, something really needs to support the dial. If we don’t hold it, the whole mechanism tilts to one side, and nothing works.

We had to go back and rethink things, but that helped us understand that we were on the wrong track, and the help from our teachers allowed us to get back on course. Of course, this is perfectly normal, and we managed to correct our approach. Thanks to Vincent, we came up with a new idea. We had already thought about creating a support block to simply hold the project up, but having only one block caused the whole structure to lean, which prevented it from staying upright and working as intended. Vincent then suggested removing the single block and adding three others to support both the lower gear (screwed to the three blocks) and the dial. Thanks to this, the project should now stand properly and function.

In practice, today, we decided to remove the glue from the non-visible parts to put ourselves in more “industrial” conditions, meaning we tried to replace glue with screws as much as possible (of course, we kept the glue for the visible parts since otherwise it would look much worse). We also designed the three support blocks in Autodesk Fusion to 3D-print them. In addition, we started trying to make better hands for the clock.

We ended the session with that and concluded that we would work on finishing the project next Friday after the final exams.