Spiny hard drives and analog clocks are pretty much anachronisms. So why not mash up the two? Actually, I was asked to come up with some items made from junk parts to assist the promotion of the Shore Foundation, where I volunteer each week. We have _a lot_ of old mechanical hard drives around, which usually get crushed and then sent on for further processing for resource recovery.

Here are examples of three slightly different conversions of hard drives into desk clocks.

There are a couple of videos out there of how other people have done it, so I will only provide details that I find have been left out of other projects.

There are a wide variety of inexpensive clock movements available. The critical differences (other than the style of the hands) are the shaft length and hands length. I suggest disassembling and drilling the hard drive first before purchasing the clock mechanism. I wanted to keep the hands within the circle of the drive platter so finding short enough hands took some effort. Likewise, measuring the length of shaft needed to keep the hands just above the laptop function keys made for a better looking final product.

The obvious place to run the clock shaft is through the mount hole for the platter bearings and motor. The bearing/motor assembly can be pretty easily knocked out of the case and the mount hole drilled out of the aluminum case to accommodate the clock shaft. I originally wanted to include the bearing assembly without the motor core in the final clock. However the bearings are made of hardened steel and sit in hardened steel races. A home-workshop-level drill press was not going to drill out those pieces. So in the end I removed the motor windings and used those over the bare case hole.

The hard disk platters are made of unbelievably polished aluminum. As soon as you pop the cover (you need Torx drivers in the T4-T6 range for the screws) the disk will never be truly clean again. In particular, the fumes from the drying super glue gel used to mount the laptop keys clouded up the disks. This required significant cleaning with 100% alcohol to remove. Any other cleaner left a residue.

Mounting the clock mechanism to the back of the hard drive case does not have an obvious solution. Sanding of both surfaces to roughen them up and then copious amounts of hot melt glue was the best solution I could find.

This is not a particularly difficult project with those things in mind.