Having completed an exit path for the balls on the time racks, the extra ball at one o’clock had to have a way to blend back into the lift. There was not enough elevation left at this point for it to wrap around on a track and join the others.
The simplest solution appeared to be dropping it onto the others just before the lift. The idea was to let the weight of the ball stop the other balls coming in from the right while allowing to lift to create a gap in the line for the one o’clock ball to fit in. A short post was added to provide support for the short track and pivot point allowing the track to drop against the other balls. The ball will sit there until a gap opens up. Once it drops in, the track lifts back up just enough to let the rest of the balls back in line.
It was a lot of theory here, but happy to say it worked. Better yet it worked every time.
The hour rack is still tipped at this point and must be reset before it can accumulate more balls. Plus the one ball that was captured when it tripped needs to go to the left end of the rack to display the proper time. The simplest solution seemed to be to reset the rack on the next minute ball that came from the lift.
So a lever was put in the path of the balls just as they came down the ramp from the lift. The ball would push the arm out of the way, rotating a shaft that went down to the latch holding the rack arm tripped. Once released, the captured ball rolls to the left end of the rack.
With that, I can let the clock run 24 hours for the first time.
It is times like these that make me think I should have stuck to conventional approaches, instead of doing something different. But then again where would the challenge be?
To much of that goes on in life the way it is and we can find ourselves in the “proverbial rut”.