I have a full-service clock shop here in town. When I was researching making my
I went there and spent an hour talking with them and figuring out how to do it.
After costing the project out...well...it came up to $350 - $500 for all I wanted to do, and it still required mechanical hacks that I just couldn't do.
Get this: the wood was the cheapest part. Even for a large clock (say, 18", like this one), the wood component would have topped out at $60. Even if I used an exotic wood like purple heart, reclaimed barnwood, chestnut or incense cedar.
Yeah, it isn't what I was envisioning, and a clock that howled at the top of the hour and chimed the hours, with sleep shutoff, would be fantastic. If I could find a local clockwork guy to do the guts, leaving me to just make the pretties, absolutely. But then I'd have to pay the clockwork guy, which means higher price tag.
Another possibility is to find an old, mechanical cuckoo clock, fix the insides, hack the face and figures and do it that way. I was going to do just that when my cancer started kicking in bigtime and I've been hung up with that and its repercussions since then. At a guess, the "mod an existing clock" would come up to around $120 for the project, but I couldn't sell it at Market, which was what I was thinking of doing.
