When I was nine or so, my engineer dad gave me a book, entitled "Make Your Own Working Paper Clock", by an endearingly geeky dude called James Smith Rudolph. Just in case there is any doubt - the title of the book should be enough - I know Mr. Rudolph to have been endearingly geeky because in his Author's Note at the beginning, he describes having bought a "dusty old paperback" in a bookshop in Paris shortly after WWII and assembled a working paper clock using the templates and instructions containd therein; he was, he describes, so delighted that he ran back to the bookshop to buy the remaining three copies, and then hoarded them for decades because he couldn't think of a single person who deserved to own one, until it occurred to him to translate and update the instructions and templates for the modern reader.
I had a valiant crack at it when I was nine, because I was then and am now a sucker for paper things that have you put tab A into slot B in order to build a pop-up replica of York Minster (for instance), but it became clear very quickly that it was way, way (way) over my head and I abandoned clock. It seems unlikely that I would have actually thrown it away, and it is probably still lurking somewhere in a box in the eaves of my parents' house. While I'm a chronic not-finisher-of-art-projects, I also maintain a high-functioning guilty-conscience-re-unfinished-art-projects, so when April 2020 happened, I ordered another copy (love/hate the internet), took the basic precaution of making a backup xerox of all the template pieces onto cardstock (as you do), and set to work.
Centuries of clock making history should have warned me that the creation of a precision time piece requires, um, precision; I was careful cutting out the pieces, but any cuts that didn't go exactly down the middle of the cut line (as opposed to a hair one side of the line) resulted in cogwheels that wouldn't engage properly; glue warped the paper (very slightly, but that was enough for the wheels to be out of true; the wire axles were impossible to get completely straight. Thus, failure.
My friend E. has a lovely clock in his kitchen with all the numbers represented by mathematical formulae: 1 o'clock, for instance, is e𝛑icos𝛑, 2 o'clock is log10(100), etc. I was so taken with the smartypants-ness of this that I decided to try once more with the paper clock so that I could outgeek even Mr. Rudolph. I recut every piece, cutting precisely down the middle of every template line; I did everything in the exact order the instructions told me to; I weighted each piece down while it dried so that the glue wouldn't warp anything; I used kebab sticks rather than wire for the axles in order to ensue they'd be straight, and... it still doesn't work. The cogs jam and won't engage, and the mechanism won't go around, and the nearly completed but nonfunctioning clock has now been sagging off my dining room wall for several months while I avoid eye contact with it.
I have now tried three times to build this fucker, and I am today officially admitting defeat. I give myself a free pass for not having been able to do it when I was nine (it's hard), or the second time (it's hard), but I did really really try this last time and I'm frustrated that I couldn't get it to work.
It's an uncomfortable moment to give up on something. It's much easier to put it back on the shelf and say, I'll finish it another day. But half an hour ago, I put my paper clock definitively into the bin. (So that I don't have to look at it every time I put something else in the bin for the next two days, I put it in the neighbours' outdoor recycling bin, not our kitchen bin, where everything else goes; I couldn't quite bear to squash it up before I put it in). I lose a half-finished paperclock; I gain some insight into the sunk cost fallacy and how pendulum clocks are made. As for future attempts, I won't totally rule it out (I have still a full set of cardstock templates, awaiting either my retirement or my next life); I also know it's doable (thanks, internet, for this video posted by a person I am jealous of), but for now this finished blog post is going to have to stand in for the finished item. For now.
