Hello Gents,

When I first built my skeleton clock in the mid to late nineties, a number of experienced clock-makers were advocating the use of a pinion cutter 1/2 a module less than the wheel with which it is to be meshed but cut on the correct diameter of pinion blank for the full module. In this case a 0,55 mod cutter on a 0.6 mod pinion blank.

I tried this system and found that, correctly meshed, this produced a very free running wheel train.

I then crossed my fingers and tried cutting a 12 leaf pinion whih a 0.55 mod 8 leaf cutter, this again ran without any problems.

The two skeleton clocks made by myself and one by a friend have been working satisfactorily for some 15 years so I adopted this principle in my bracket clock design, again with no problems.

Experienced clockmakers can sense when pinion and wheel pairs are correctly meshed but, being a novice, I set a wheel and pinion in the simple depth tool until the tips of pinion leaf and wheel tooth just `brushed` together and then reduced the centre distance by the sum of the addenda of wheel and pinion. This worked fine.

I hope that this experience helps othersand would like to thaks those who have already commented on this topic.

John Parslow