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David_P, I really enjoyed your tear down of the 4 handed Tide Clock, and the way you counted gear teeth, and worked out the ratios. 

12:25:14 = Conventional Quartz controlled Tide Clock Rotation Period.  

12:25:15.8 = David's Gear ratios Rotation Period.

Only a 3.6 second a day delta, is much better than I thought a "gearing only" solution would achieve David, I'm most impressed.

Now, we’ve got the hours, we’ve got the tide due to the Moon alone

Not quite David.

The Tide clock is predicated on the Moon *always* taking 50.472144 minutes / day *extra* to "appear" to go round the earth.  

I have attached a graph that shows the *actual* daily transit delay of the Moon, as it passes over the Humber Yawl Clubhouse for 90 days.

If one plots 14,000 transits, the Moon's Transit delay varies from 38.62 to 68.36 minutes per day. Our little Tide clocks do not allow for this variation of the Moon - they just use the 50.472144 minutes daily AVERAGE all the time! - so that is a source of error, before we even consider how the Sun "adds and subtracts" to the Moons M2 constituent.

To see how to build the "ultimate" mechanical Tide clock David, here are beautiful historic machines they used to predict tides -  before computers made it a simple task.

To understand how they made the Harmonic Constituents create a Tidal Waveform, here is an amazing Simulator that shows Lord Kelvin's wonderful Tide machine Theory in action.

Many thanks again for your 4 Handed clock teardown David, I really enjoyed your findings - well done!.

Regards, Geoff Hitchcox, Christchurch, New Zealand.

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