A note on hanging chain clocks

So BoingBoing has an item on hanging chain clocks, on sale from Ticktock Showroom at a bargain $100. I wrote about a similar art piece by Andreas Dober a year ago on these very pages, but that had a price tag of $2,338, so I'm glad to see bicycle chains have come down in price.

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Here's the thing though: to my eyes, both this clock and the original by Dober are backwards. The clock is designed so that the chain takes the place of the hands as the moveable part, and thus someone decided that it should go clockwise. As a result, the numbers are printed in the opposite order to a usual clock. This is all wrong! The "hands" of ths clock are FIXED at the top of the clock, and the dial is turning instead. Ergo, these numbers should move ANTI-CLOCKWISE, as they do normally relative to the movement of the hands.

Or am I just being weird?

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You are totally right.

You have to invert something, either the order of numbers or the direction of movement. Just call it artistic freedom (or, as an engineer, you turn the chain around, chance two wires over and are done).

"The clock is designed so that the chain takes the place of the hands as the moveable part, and thus someone decided that it should go clockwise."

Rather than someone "deciding" it should go clockwise, I suspect they just used a standard set of clock-guts, such as one can get at a crafts shop for $5.

When I saw the first one posted I liked it so much that I made something similar for my girlfriend, except that I put the 3, 6, 9, and 12 on a backing board and had a mark on the chain that would circle every 12 hours. This one is cooler.

If you want to get technical, us Americans think it should go COUNTER-CLOCKWISE.

Or we don't really care either way.