I Made my first printed clock a few days ago and everything went great! Steve, your design skills are unbelievable! Everything fit together perfectly and the build was very easy due to your highly detailed instructions, and fantastic build videos. This will not be my last clock build from you. In fact I'm working on your silent desk clock build right now.
I printed this clock using PETG filament. I was worried about pla filament being too brittle. I have had pla parts that were under stress for a few days and they cracked where the stress was applied. They were parts for a windmill so maybe this happened because they were very thin and resting while bent against a table. I'm sure a good quality pla filament wouldn't have this issue, and I know you've had good success with pla filament.
This clock is running on 8.5 pounds. The initial test without the anchor installed needed about 2.5 pounds to get things spinning freely. I decided to try a 6 pound weight just to see if the clock would run. It did for a few minutes, but would stop frequently. I printed the larger weight shell to fit more weight and got it up to 8.5 pounds. Knock on wood it is running very good! Today is the third day it is still running. I have it hung up in a temporary location for now.
Thank you so much for the hard work you put into all your designs. I'm very happy with how this one turned out and it was very fun to put together.
Thanks for the positive comments. The colors look good together. The clock should run even better as the parts wear in.
PETG should be fine. I haven't had any trouble with PLA cracking, so I never bothered trying PETG. I try to add enough thickness to parts where I think there might be stresses. My guess is that the weight shell is the highest risk. One weak layer and there could be BBs all over the floor. It hasn't happened to me yet. :)