Frankie Flood makes pizza cutters that are unlike anything you’ve ever seen.
As Frankie says,
My work investigates one of a kind objects and their role in a world based on mechanical reproduction. Industry has removed the aura from objects and stripped them of their individuality. My pizza cutters seek to demolish the sterile conformity of mass produced objects and represent the stylistic and flamboyant embellishment of groups who live on the fringe of popular culture. The outlaw biker image is a break from the conformity that has taken over America since industrialization. My machined pizza cutters draw inspiration from chopper motorcycles and attempt to reclaim the mythology and economic usefulness of the American worker as patriarch; translating machine or functional object into flesh and blood. The outlaw as defiant nonconformist, as well as social outcast, parallels being an artist who makes functional objects and being an individual who takes pride in the power of invention and skill.
Be sure to check out Frankie’s site for other objects that he has given his special touch to.
John Taylor’s Corpus Clock, aka the Chronophage, or ‘time eater’, is an impressive looking beast of a clock that was made as a tribute to eighteenth-century clockmaker John Harrison’s grasshopper escapement, a low-friction mechanism for converting pendulum motion into rotational motion.
Despite it’s massive size (over 1.5 meters in diameter) the Corpus Clock’s inner workings are all mechanically controlled, including the world’s largest grasshopper escapement that adorns the top. Electricity does power an electric motor, which winds the clock, and blue LEDs which light up the hours, minutes, and seconds, but the blinking eye, moving mouth, swinging hands and everything else you see is all old-school mechanical.
Another interesting element of the clock is that it’s only accurate once every five minutes. The rest of the time, the pendulum can stop, the lights can lag, and then everything can race to catch up, symbolizing life’s “irregularity”. Despite this irregularity though, the clock is expected to stay accurate for the next 200 years or more.
At a cost of over one million pounds, this solid 24-karat gold clock definitely wasn’t cheap, and it took over five years for the two hundred people involved in the making of the clock to get everything put together, but if you’re going to design the world’s strangest clock, no one ever said it was going to be easy.
The De Grisogono Meccanico DG is possibly the coolest watch I’ve ever seen.
Scratch that; The De Grisogono Meccanico DG is the coolest watch I’ve ever seen.
Why?
Because it’s “the first all mechanical watch with a digital display integrated into it”.
Let me repeat: An all mechanical watch with a digital display. No LEDs. No digital parts. Just 651 of the smallest watch pieces imaginable working together to make magic happen.
Sink in yet?
Basically, the DG 042 De Grisgono manual movement that powers the watch uses some sort of half magic half mystery potion to make the numbers at the bottom change every minute, and in doing so, causes shock and awe inside of anyone that sees it.
It’s either that, or they figured out how to shrink little elves and keep them alive inside of the watch, but I prefer to believe the former.
According to the press release:
The mechanically operated digital display of the second timezone shows tens of hours, single hours, tens of minutes and single minutes, all displayed by mobile microsegments driven by an assemblage of 23 cams connected to a set of gears and a triggering and synchronization system. The time information is displayed by an array of 23 horizontally and vertically positioned microsegments. Vertical segments are 9 mm high and weigh at most 25 milligrams while the horizontal segments measure 2.90 mm in length and weigh only 10 milligrams. The segments have four faces: two opposing visible faces fitted with colored strips and two opposing unmarked faces. Time changes are effected by 90° rotations of the required segment or segments. Involving one to twelve segments, time changes are lightning fast.
Only 177 of this super limited edition will be made available in either red gold, titanium and gold, titanium and platinum, or titanium and rubber, and if you have to ask, you can’t afford it. (But believe me, with a watch like this, most people will have to ask!)
John Taylor’s Corpus Clock, aka the Chronophage, or ‘time eater’, is an impressive looking beast of a clock that was made as a tribute to eighteenth-century clockmaker John Harrison’s grasshopper escapement, a low-friction mechanism for converting pendulum motion into rotational motion.
