The students of a high school in Wakayama Prefecture have constructed a clock featuring a rotating sculpture of the DeLorean time machine from the "Back to the Future" movie franchise and have displayed it in their school courtyard.
Over the course of five years, the students of Tanabe Technical High School have worked together to construct the masterpiece in the hopes that it will become their new school symbol.
Measuring about 4.20 meters long, 2.20 meters wide, and 1.10 meters high, the vehicle's surface is made from 2 millimeter-thick aluminum sheets and features LED lighting in various areas, including head lights. Because the students had no official blueprints for their model of the time-traveling sports car, they determined its size and color by using commercially available models and the aforementioned movies as reference materials.
The sculpture slowly rotates at four specific times each weekday -- 9:00 a.m., noon, 3:00 p.m., and 6:00 p.m. -- to the theme song from the first movie. At 6:00 p.m., the lights around the base also glow, attracting many local residents.
Since the beginning, about 400 to 500 students have been involved in the project, building the vehicle's chassis and base or adding the lights, which were installed in the courtyard back in March 2020. After that, three students from the school's manufacturing research club built a drive unit to enable the sculpture's rotation function, which was ultimately completed at the end of December that year.
Masaki Hirohata, creator of the drive unit, said, "We were thrilled to be able to bring this project that our upperclassmen had been working on for years to completion. I hope that seeing the DeLorean will make more students want to enroll in our school."
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