Tourbillon watch printed on a 3D printer

Ordinary clocks were printed on 3D printers more than once or twice. But no one has printed a watch with a tourbillon until now. What is a tourbillon?

Wikipedia saysto us the following: “Breguet invented in 1795, and in 1801 patented a tourbillon (French tourbillon - vortex) - a device for partial compensation of the Earth’s gravity. The tourbillon consists of a balance, an anchor fork and an anchor wheel located on a special rotating platform (the most common rotation speed: 1 revolution per minute). This is one of the most complex and expensive additional mechanisms. The maximum accuracy of inexpensive mechanical watches reaches ± 5 seconds per day; high-quality: up to ± 1 sec per day, inexpensive quartz watches (this is a more modern mechanism, for comparison): ± 1/2 sec. per day. The accuracy of the watch with a tourbillon is: -1 / + 2 sec. per day. Often the tourbillon is made visible through a window in the dial. In fact, the tourbillon rotates the entire clockwork around its axis in one minute, which,

And now this entire complex system was printed on a 3D printer, and the result was quite interesting.

This miracle was created by Christoph Lamier, who designed everything necessary in Autodesk Fusion 360. The watch consists of 50 parts, including springs, cogs, and other parts. The most difficult to "print" - a hair spring, an anchor, a trigger wheel and some other elements.



Yes, a 2-meter-long spring was also printed on the printer, and this would have been impossible without a special device setup. To create such a spring, select the 'combing' or 'avoid crossing perimeters' setting.

If you have time, you can watch a video lasting about half an hour. All the features of such watches are shown here, so there is something to see.



If there is no time, then you can study the shortened version of the video:



Well, and a little more, the assembly of the watch is accelerated here:



By the way, the design of this watch, according to the author, is similar to the design of a pocket watch. But the result was somewhat larger than a regular pocket watch. So you need either a large pocket or a smaller watch to fit in this pocket. But the chain already exists - the author also printed it.