I built an automatic watch winder

Glamour shot first. The wood is spalted curly maple that I got from retiring woodworker. It was pretty warped and punky, so this was a good project for it. I didn't have a finished design to work off of when I was making this; kinda just made it up as I went along. Very much not my style, but necessary when there are things I don't know how to do for the build.

The case slowly rotates the watches so the automatic winding mechanism in the watches keeps them powered. This is normally accomplished by just wearing the watch on your wrist, but who wears 15 watches at the same time?

The guts of the mechanism. I designed and 3D printed the parts, many of which were too big for my lulzbot mini and required me to slice, print, and glue. I bought a low-speed 12V motor and transformer to power the whole mechanism.

Hit me up if you want the STL files for any of the components.

Firing it up for the first time. Wiring was pretty straightforward, so I was more concerned about whether the components would mesh well. The spur gear add on in fusion 360 helped a lot with the design.

I applied flocking to the components to make them look nice and provide good friction for the watch pillows.

I had to desolder and detach the power switch to get it to fit through the top of the case because there would be no way to wire it up once the case was glued up.

The glue up was pretty tricky because I had two panels to fit in dados and also had to get all the miters to line up. I also didn't think I needed to do a dry fit for some reason. I cut the circles on my CNC because I'm ridiculous.

The lid is just a mitered frame with a 1/8" dado to accept a piece of custom cut glass. I connected the lid to two 10" pistons to hold the lid open and provide a fun whoosh sound whenever I opened it.

Between the speed controller and the gear reduction, I can get the speed of the case down to about 1 rotation a minute, which is great for this application and virtually silent in operation. I'm considering adding some edging along the circles to provide a smoother transition and hide the internals a bit better. I also got tons of ideas for version 2.0, which I design and make sometime next year.

Thanks for looking!