Edible Gingerbread Cuckoo Clock with Internal gears

Step 2 Making the foam core template and gears

Research:
To make this shape, I did a bunch of research on cuckoo clocks and put a couple of interesting ones together to make this shape. I liked the birds and the reindeer motif so I added those and it seemed that no cuckoo clock was complete without leaves.

Sketch:
I first did a sketch of what I wanted it to look like and then did a rough sizing estimate to figure out how big I wanted it to be.

Gears:
Let me first say that I don't know the first thing about gears. But I wanted to try this out  so When it came time to figure out the gears I used this program - Gear Template Generator in order to create them.  Basically this free online program allows you to control the size and style of your gears by the number of teeth, contact angle, tooth spacing, shaft hole etc. You can only create two gears at a time with the program but it's easy enough to use one gear from another set to create a new set. It's pretty neat. I made 4 gears (That's really all I thought you would be able to see through the front of the clock)

Cutting out all the shapes and assembling:
After I had figured out what I wanted I drew it on to foam core, cut it all out and taped it together to create what you see in the pictures. The foam core gears that I had created worked okay, but they did squish a bit as foam core tends to do, when I tried to turn them. I could only hope that Gingerbread gears would be harder and would turn okay.