In 1656, Pope Alexander VII commissioned the Fratelli Campani to build a clock that made no ticking sound. 370 years later, maker Many Vices 3D-printed a functional replica of the mechanism, working from a brass recreation documented by watchmaker Carlo G. Croce in a detailed PDF and accompanying video series.
The core engineering is what demands attention: the original uses an eccentric crank escapement instead of the standard anchor escapement. The crank produces continuous motion, eliminating the tick, but the tradeoff is brutal power efficiency. Many Vices tests both mechanisms on camera, and the runtime difference is not subtle. The crank escapement bleeds energy fast. His secondary experiment, a linear-rail spring pendulum, looks striking but performs worse than traditional clockwork by a significant margin.
The unresolved question buried in the build is whether tuning the flywheel mass to match the pendulum's resonant frequency could recover meaningful runtime. The original article does not answer this, which is reason enough to watch the full video. The anchor escapement survived centuries of competition for a reason, and this build makes that case in extruded plastic.
[READ ORIGINAL →]