An Open-Source replica of the legendary device for all. Build your own or reserve your hand-crafted masterpiece today.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
October Progress Update
over 1 year ago
– Wed, Oct 09, 2024 at 08:26:43 PM
We are happy to report that we now have a fully tweaked FullMonty prototype on hand with multiple improvements over the prior (FM) prototypes.
Our Focus right now is on Shipping first kits before the end of the month. We will start slow to ensure our kits arrive at destination in good condition.
If you ordered a FullMonty kit, Backerkit will be sending you in the next few days a request for Address Confirmation. This will give you 3 days to change your address (if you moved) before Backerkit locks the address you provided.
We are sorry if this is your delivery person, but otherwise we believe your kit should arrive in good condition as we are designing our packing to protect and offer you the nearly 300 components organized into 7 efficient trays to work from.
Pictures of Trays Follow this link to our YouTube channel to see the Open Antikythera FullMonty Kit Unboxing experience:
James designed every single component in his favorite (Corel CAD) software, and I am particularly proud of how he solved the back needles.
The 2 needles need to follow a spiral groove for an 18- and 19-year cycle while working vertically pointing up or down with just the right amount of pressure to stay in the groove.
Picture of needles
We also decided to produce a set of Clear Sides to see how it would look, and we totally fell in love with the way it shows off all of our beautiful laser cut gears. If you would prefer clear sides, just let me know via a Kickstarter message
Picture of Full Monty Clear Sides
James also improved the crank by making it a bit bigger and adding a spinning handle.
Picture of Full Monty Crank
Till next update, - James & Marc
September Update
over 1 year ago
– Tue, Sep 24, 2024 at 11:37:52 AM
Hello again patient Kickstarter community,
We have made progress in the last month and a half towards building our next Open Antikythera Full Monty (Full Mechanism) Prototypes and have an offer for one of you. More on that later...
We, as before, have been busy manually milling more Axles, Rods and Dowels. The pre-made dowel replacement (set screws) we ordered have arrived and will work just as fine for those 2 specific gears. We also received the allen keys to drive them so every Full Monty kit will receive an allen key along with the 4 set screws you receive. This will save us a bunch of time and provide an as good or better product at the end. We are now way past the mid-point in our making of axels and have started focusing on the preparations for the assembly of the next prototype(s).
Noon and 3 o'clock are brass dowels and 6 and 9 o'clock are set screws for testing
We just received an update from Rownd that they have just started shipping their CNC Lathe (YEAH!), but we have no idea when we will receive ours (Grrr). And we have received (and installed) our Wazer Pro Waterjet. It is a fantastic tool! It has already created a few iterations of our Metonic and Saros needles for the back side. We still need to integrate the spiral pointer and are currently evaluating different techniques...
Wazer Pro Waterjet Ready
Saros Test Needles
You already know about our extensive use of bearings to minimize friction, but at this point, we figure we should share another small secret: we generously apply a 1.0 mm spacer between every gear to prevent rubbing friction.
Only this unit will require this 2mm shim on the right as the crank block has been redesigned.
We made a lot of small improvements via repeated iterations for the Full Monty:
Our current priority is to run through each individual process(es) to make 1 Full Mechanism unit and see how close this Production Candidate (3rd generation prototype) can be to the final production article. If you are in a rush to obtain your assembled FullMonty or don't want to wait for the full production run, and are ready to accept receiving a prototype that may or may not be exactly identical to the production units, and will provide personal feedback to me, please Message us through Kickstarter and the first one of you who backed us for an assembled FullMonty to respond to this offer (US address only please) will receive (by the end of October) this prototype we are currently building. This has the added benefit for us to test our packing/shipping.
Some of you have asked for a delivery schedule. and we are very sorry we cannot provide a shipping schedule at this moment, but we are getting closer!
Till next update, - James & Marc
Last July Update
over 1 year ago
– Tue, Jul 30, 2024 at 08:03:24 PM
Hey there, Open Antikythera Kickstarter community, we still to this date haven’t received our Kickstarter backed Rownd CNC Mill yet, and despite our best efforts, we still haven’t found anybody to help us with this super precise and demanding task. So we (James & I) still have to manually make every single Axle, Rod and Dowel by hand using our Manual Mini Lathe, which is a super slooooow process, because it is very labor intensive, and that is what we are focusing on right now. We are Open Source and can share with everyone who desires our specs for each Axle, Dowel and Rod.
To further compound the amount of labor, the total quantity of Axles, Rods and Dowels we would need for a FullMonty Antikythera device comes up to 1926, not the 1346 we originally estimated until July.
The good news is James has hopefully figured a way where we may be able to use tiny set screws (M3.5 x 7mm) instead of the 744 Double-Gear dowels we need while maintaining the same (or better) quality level. So we ordered 1000. If successful, this would save us from having to manually mill these 744 dowels. It certainly is worth the experiment.
So we have made at this moment a sub-total of: 474 out of the 1240 Axles, Rods and Dowels we will need to complete fulfillment and are continuing at (a slow) but steady pace.
Plenty of 3mm Brass stock to mill down
Once this process is complete, the rest of the steps should be faster as our laser cutters are quick and all our 3D printers in our 3D print farm can operate without supervision.
Being Kickstarter (super) Backers ourselves, we certainly understand that you would all prefer receiving your FullMonty Antikythera assembled units or kits NOW, rather than reading about the amount of work it takes to get there… But there is a reason why no one else has ever offered commercially a complete working replica of the original Antikythera unit!
While this work is going on, James is also pondering on a spring loaded mechanism to keep the long (backside) needles to stay in their 18/19 year cycle spiral grooves.
Please understand that our UpFront (oratory section) is unique to us and quite cool by itself, but the full original Antikythera mechanism (implemented in our FullMonty) is about 2.5 times the complexity of our “truncated” UpFront.
Thank you for your patience, wonderful Kickstarter community.
P.S. If any of you want to volunteer your help is assisting with the milling of these Axles and Rods, or the written documentation, please message us.
Thank You,
- Marc & James
More mods for FullMonty Open Antikythera
over 1 year ago
– Mon, Jul 01, 2024 at 06:51:03 PM
To further reduce friction and provide a better unit, we designed a support to hold the formerly unsupported end of the double gears axles. We are also redesigning the axle that holds the large pointers on the back (spirals). So we had to source some bigger, heavier bearings.
On the left is the old axle and the new redesigned version is on the right side.
This week, we plan to continue manually milling the required 1346 brass axles, rods and dowels required to fulfill as our Kickstarter backed CNC Lathe (Rownd) has still not shown up yet.
Our god old manual mini lathe does a good job of making axles, but it sure is time intensive! We are praying for a ROWND CNC miracle!
June Update
almost 2 years ago
– Tue, Jun 04, 2024 at 08:38:30 PM
While we are very looking forward to completing fulfillment of all of our FullMonty Antikytheras, we are also focused on delivering a quality product.
We have shipped all rewards on schedule for our previous 2 Kickstarters and were totally planning the same for Open Antikythera. We have managed to ship a quality "UpFront" product on schedule so far, but we do believe we will slip a bit for the FullMonty.
These are not excuses, but:
Quality is #1. We had to make some tweaks for the UpFront and these tweaks are required and more are needed for the FullMonty.
We needed to optimize our part manufacturing/inventory processes and assembly method.
We still need to update the assembly instructions for a FullMonty.
We took the time to clean up, re-arrange our Design Studio with additional power and space to receive our Wazer (this WaterJet will allow the future production of solid Brass units with Brass Gears).
We have started manually making every single brass axle, rod and dowel, one by one, on our mini-lathe and this will continue to be an on-going effort for a while.
We appreciate your patience, but unfortunately, despite multiple prototypes, we have not perfected our product yet.
