Confusa-Clock

Picture a clock with no numbers on its face. It has markings for each hour, each half-hour, and maybe even each minute – but none of them has any definite label attached.

The round clock is attached to the wall via a single screw at its very centre. Around this fixed point is an almost frictionless bearing, which means that the whole clock can be spun very easily about this central axis.

The workings of the clock are distributed evenly throughout its unseen innards, but together they constitute a hardy, robust little mechanism that can shunt clock hands forwards no matter what its orientation is.

The minute and hour hands are both weighted, so the clock twists and turns on the wall throughout the day, more a slave to gravity than to time. The second hand, with its sixty-second orbit, just confuses matters all the more.

I really wanted to find a mechanism whereby the moving hands could have variable weight and thus churn the clock even more unexpectedly – lava lamp clock hands was the best I could come up with.