Oh man, I hope I'm not late. I'm here to meet Ray Saunders. He's the man who built the steam clock right here in Gastown. And gosh, I was supposed to meet him right around now. I better find him. The steam clock story begins in 1975 when the city of Vancouver had a steam vent in Gastown that needed covering. But the solution used elsewhere wasn't right for Gastown. I didn't want to have snugly cement planter box in Gastown. So he told me and said, would I build a steam clock? And at the time I was too stupid and couldn't be done. So I said, I would do it. And this is what's resulted. Was this the first major project of this scale that you had done? This is the very first public clock I built. I did a lot of, I was a metal sculpture for about 10 years. And I made a lot of wall sculpture clocks, you know, 10 or 12 feet high, but nothing outdoors. So this is my very first effort at a public clock. And I'm very gratified to see how popper it's become. It's sort of a must see tourist attraction in Vancouver. And one of the most photographed pieces of attractions in the city. But I was working on it part time. And it was a difficult to build this clock when the money was just trickling in for the steam clock committee that was volunteering to raise the money. So the money, as the money trickled in, the steam clock got built. So it was in my basement down the street here in Gastown. We took the staircase out and we built the clock up through the basement, right up through the stairs. Sanders original design included some special features. And I built a little ledge here for little kids to climb up so they can get their feet up on here and climb up on the clock and have a look inside. That's the whole idea of it. Oh, that's great. While we were talking, the quarter hour passed without a sound from the steam clock. Ray opened it up to try to fix it. And in the process, he explained to me just how the clock's Rube Goldberg type mechanism works. We have all these small steel balls which are the weights. Now each one of these balls is about one pound. And they are geared five to one. So each ball is pulling five pounds on the mechanism. And every five minutes a steel ball comes off the here and rolls across the other side. Like that. It comes up, lifts the ball up and carries it to the top and gets ready for it to load back down to the other side. Forgive me, confusion, but I don't understand why the steam doesn't directly drive the mechanism and what the balls are. The balls are the weight drive to make an accurate clock. You have to use gravity to drive the movement. The gravity powered clock. And it's steam wound up. That's all. And in most sense, trying to drive an engine clock mechanism with steam because... It's not accurate. Not accurate. And this is the accuracy of this clock is the pendulum. How a pendulum length isn't how it swings. So it still comes down to the pendulum even with everything. I'm afraid the crease is coming out of my pants here. Okay. It could be the foo foo valve. Oh! Falsy foo foo valve. Here we go. Falsy foo. Believe it or not, the clock's not finished. There's still a few features Ray would like to add. I want to put some little lights in the clock to light up the inside of it and my future plans down the road are to put some little bronze people in the clock doing little whimsical tasks. Like the 1890s figures work when they're frozen in time. Like oiling and adjusting and doing little tasks inside the clock to make it more fun for the kids. The kids of all ages. Any future plans for any grand schemes for clocks of the future? Right out here on the waterfront I have some grandioso ideas for the world's first laser beam clock. At night on the hour a light beam will shoot out of the top of the clock will be seen for over 30 miles away which will signal the time by flashing on and off a green beam. This is getting ready for the Millennium. I'm calling it the Millennium Clock. I'm just looking for someone who's interested in buying a clock in the million dollar range. That's what it is. Thanks so much for talking with me. Okay, bye.