“Get on US-12/US-18, exit to I-90W toward Eau Claire. Continue on I-90/I-94W. Exit in Seattle.”

Here’s the product of my Sunday evening. It’s a clock that ticks counterclockwise. But is it really counterclockwise if that’s the direction the clock is ticking?

Don’t take my word for it, see for yourself [422 KB MPEG4 (codec required) 4.97 MB AVI warning. I know it’s huge; I don’t have time to recompress; deal with it.]

So I’ll admit, I followed an online guide to making clocks tick backward. I happened to see the guide on hackaday.com, and thought it was cool. Then on Sunday my ICPC team and I were in the bookstore buying binders and other supplies for the contest next week, and Ray mentioned that he wanted a new travel alarm clock. So we looked at the clocks, and this one was only $5.50 or so, so I thought “why not? if I break it, it was only $6.” So I bought it, took it apart, made the appropriate modification and reassembled it. The longest part of the process was actually creating the new clock face to put inside it. I wanted one that would still accurately display the time, so I made one in the GIMP. It was harder than I anticipated because I had to measure out 6° rays from the center point to draw the dots so that they would actually line up with the clock hands. You can download my clock face in native GIMP format or JPEG, if you so desire.

A word to the budding clock modder in all of you: take the face off the clock first, as there are probably screws hidden behind it. Fortunately I realized this before resorting to breaking the back off when I couldn’t get the thing taken apart.