The Giant Clock
In 1996, Peter Von started on months of the Victorian-era Giant Mantelpiece Clock for The Pancake Parlour in the Jam Factory, Chapel Street.
Peter Von got some lads to build a massive arched-top construction in plaster, held up by columns. The plan was to neatly slip a giant clock case in polished timber with a full sized figure of Harold Lloyd, the Hollywood star, in imitation of a scene from one of his movies from the early twenties, ‘Safety Last’ where he hung precariously from town hall clock face.
One of Peter Von’s major problems was where to get a figure of Harold Lloyd that would be convincing enough to carry the idea. He called Laila the blonde Adelaide bazoom sculptor. “Harold Lloyd, who the bloody hell was he?” was her helpful retort. “But I’ll do it”, she said, followed by “Gimme a photo.”
Naturally as promised, she did it, modelling an uncanny and lifelike Harold Lloyd in no time. He was fitted with a suit and shoes from the Salvos. Laila cast some hands in rubber from her partners, coated the suit in a clear glaze usually used to tart up tiled roofs, found a pair of 1920s-style round glasses and there you have it! It was as near to the real thing as possible ... the expression of panic and all!
Along with all this, Laila also created a Monkey Movie Director complete with a megaphone whose job it was to control a mechanical mural in black and white for the restaurant inside, but more of that later ...
Many people do not recognise Harold Lloyd, his name or his work. But, in his day, Lloyd was more famous and popular than Charlie Chaplin, and commanded a much greater fee, as his athletic feats were legendary. He made more than 500 movies including 11 silent features. Lloyd’s astonishing stunts and gags were a lasting contribution to both American culture and to the international art of film comedy. Lloyd will always be remembered for his stunt hanging on for dear life to the hands of a clock precariously attached to a skyscraper. The clock face scene from Safety Last was his most ambitious and chosen as the theme for the area as the brief was to make sure anything built was faithfully Hollywood of the 1920s. The Giant Harold Lloyd clock was The Pancake Parlour’s homage to Harold Lloyd.
Peter Von:
To begin my part of the bargain and create the actual clock, I had firstly to get around the size. No more building in the family room at home! Fortunately, Regal Display, a local sign company, found room for me at their factory and the gorgeous routed timber giant clock case started to become a reality. Mucking about at home on MDF, trying to create a convincing phoney blacked graining instead of the prohibitively expensive real thing, I gradually developed a technique so faultless that I actually surprised myself, the greatest critic.
With spirit stain, old brushes, fingers and a school eraser, my imitation blacked graining became the talk of the factory. I cut out a stack of large mock ‘gears’ in MDF that John “Tilly” Tillbrook eventually mechanised in such a way that exposed what appeared to be meshing inside the case. How he did it so that they rotated, stopped and went backwards, while still looking utterly convincing, is still a mystery to me.
I had a shallow, large acrylic dish made which the master Reg Stevens gave a glorious shaded gold finish to. I trimmed it with lots of fancy polished brass, and we had a pendulum just like that, still ponderously swinging years later.
Whilst I struggled with the giant milky white acrylic face of the clock, attaching the computer-cut vinyl numbers and the LOVELY! Lady face, Tilly, in another state, was building what we think is the largest mechanism outside Big Ben in London. It’s certainly the most complicated. Simple in outward appearances, the actual movement, with its masses of computer technology, is itself probably a greater work of art than my contribution: the shear size of the works for a start, tucked away behind the frosted acrylic face; the massive gears and levers, not to mention the actual hands, laser cut from mild steel 16 mm thick and so heavy with the great bearing that joins to Harold Lloyds hand that they are difficult to lift!
After months of building, the works contained in a steel tube frame were completed. The case I had made in Adelaide fitted like a glove. A scissor lift and fork lift were then bought in for the heart-stopping job of standing it upright, lifting it and hopefully slotting it gently into its final resting place under the now neon enhanced “Anytime is Pancake Time” arch. We might have known it wouldn’t be that easy!
Okay, to be sure, it nearly fitted. I had left only about 10 mm gap for it to just slide in, not taking into account any larger error in constructing the plastered arch. Naturally, as is always the way, it jammed dramatically and infuriatingly in one small spot. Take some off the case or the arch? Votes were taken, points put forward, opinions stated! On pain of death, some brave soul, metres off the ground took some off my lovely wood-grained case and we tried again.
Next problem? The scissor lift refused to lift other than in 20 mm or so jerks, up or down: it was either too high or the bottom snagged. Not helped by the sheer weight of the whole thing which magnified each movement – it literally tottered on the scissor lift.
Finally, Tilly the genius solved it by sliding, believe it or not, pieces of thin cardboard one at a time under the scissor-lift wheels, to much derision from the gathered workers. Predictably it worked, and the whole thing slid quickly and perfectly into the arch. The massive hands were manhandled into place, the pendulum was hooked on, the doors were shut with the lovely brass handle and Harold lifted awkwardly up into the special bearing.
It was nearly all over and months of effort were finally ready to roll, so to speak. It took Tilly hours to connect the electrical supply, stoke up the computers and tweak the controls before the great clock, with Harold gently swaying from the one-minute-at-a-time jerking of the hands, totally and convincingly came to life. What a result!
Inside the restaurant, Nick Luke was ready to fit a giant frame on the back wall, high up onto which the largest mechanical tossing race I had done so far, in black-and-white cut-out form, was to fit. Months earlier, back in Adelaide, I had hired a young Adelaide animation engineer, Eric Gittens, to mechanise this mural tied in with the monkey film director mentioned earlier, made by Laila.
A carpenter, Johnno, an itinerant from the stage craft world, and I –endlessly (and mindlessly), it seemed – spent weeks jig-sawing out sheets of MDF mounted with tossing race characters, which were to come to life on the hour as is the usual. Because of the heat, we were forced to bring all this cut-out MDF into the family room of the house, yet again, to mechanise it. Obviously, as I tried to explain to the Missus, it would have been better outside, but the 40-degree heat meant the MDF warped alarmingly and the stuck-on images started to fall off! Divorce at one stage seemed a distinct possibility when she came home from her work to find endless cut-outs stacked all over the house, the edges freshly painted white, together with the tiled floor.
The Giant Mantelpiece Clock sadly now sits in storage after the closure of the Jam Factory restaurant. If anyone has a spare super-huge dining-room wall …