Nick Wimpney of Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada
Analog AOL Clock

Nick submitted his entry with this letter:

"So, this is a clock, as you can probally tell. We decided that we'd film it in non-linear stop motion, because your mailbox probably wouldn't hold the 30fps real time one, and my hard drive was getting full anyways.

As you can possibly tell from the pictures, I used a deceptively large number of cd's, as the gears are all 4 disks thick totalling 24 disks, 22 of which are aol, not to mention the 20 or so which exploded during early development. Including Aol version 3.0, New version 3.0, Titanium version 5.0, and the funny 4 coloured one without a version number. And last but not least, The clock faces are printed on peeled cdr disks, due to the fact that Aol has not yet released the "AOL Stealth edition" Eventually, I plan to expand this from a simple minute/hour clock to a second, minute, hour, and day of the week clock, using the remaining 75 or so cd's which i did not yet use.

For future reference, the only good way to cut polycarbonite is using a grinder. I tried all of the fancy tools first. Milling machine, lathe, and hacksaw. But finally ended up cutting the gear teeth freehand with an autobody grinder. Effective but MESSY. I'm still coughing up plastic dust.

Hope you can tell what's going on... Haven't got a good camera, so we took all the pictures with a friend's camcorder, hooked to an ati all in wonder video card. I took some pictures of the individual parts, so you can understand how it works, in spite of the mediocre photography.

P.S.: If you're ever stuck for ideas on another contest, Hard drive platters will handle a lot more torque than AOL Disks ;)"

Here's the pictures Nick included:

Nick also included a stop-motion AVI of his clock in action, and you can see it here. Talk about elaborate! It must have been a huge pain in the ass just getting this thing to work, let alone build. Very original and very well made, so we won't tease Nick about his last name =)

We did notice the top two winners are both Canadian. Don't you guys have anything better to do up there?

...on to Third Place ->