Automatic Watch Cleaning Machine

If you wear a watch regularly, it’s bound to pick up bits of dirt and grime, which you probably wipe off without thinking. Getting a watch really spotless by hand, however – i.e. cleaning the nooks and crannies that would be difficult to reach, even a toothpick – is more of a challenge. To help with this task, David Burke created a custom four-stage watch cleaning machine by repurposing a Creality CR10S Pro V2 3D printer.

To implement this setup, Burke replaced the printer’s extruder assembly with a mount for a 24VDC gear motor, and positioned three liquid containers and a drying heater fan on the former print bed.

This gear motor is connected to a small basket via a rigid coupling and shaft, which contains the watch-in-process. The (former) printing gantry moves the watch basket to each liquid container, dunking, spinning, and removing it in sequence. In the final step, the basket is held over the dryer, where it spins and is heated to expel the remaining liquid.

The system runs via Klipper, under the control of a Raspberry Pi 3B+, and a number of modifications had to be done to the code and hardware in order for it to accommodate the printer's new operation. More details can be found in the project's write-up, and you can see it in action in the video below.

You might not need your own watch washer, but this conversion is a good reminder that with a bit of creative modification, 3D printing hardware can be used for a lot more than laying down filament!