I work at a largish industrial electronics company, and while the stuff we develop is pretty cool, most of it is related to communication infrastructure so its not what I would say is excessively FUN to design. So a number of us do home projects and often time try and outdo each other. So when a co-worker brought in a Nixie tube clock he built from a kit, I felt the need to one up him with an even geekier clock. Remembering that I had seen a couple of meter based clocks on here I decided to make one. At first I thought about doing it as fully geeked out steampunk. Even played around with building a piston type thing to simulate a steam engine. At the end I settled on just making it look vintage, so that I would have a fighting chance to get it done in a decent amount of time.