Hey Clockmaster, I recently met this guy who sells his hand made clocks for many thousands of dollars. He told me that he makes the gears using a gear cutting machine.
He cuts 10 or more gears at a time. He uses a high desity compressed timber compound for the gears, and puts a thin laminate on the front of them. Essentially you see only the teeth. He tells me that these gears could go for a 100 years without wearing. Unfortunately I can only find a small picture of the process he uses. In this case it is much better than the CNC option you are thinking about, and also cheaper.
His process is to stack the gears together and cut along the stack, and then rotate the stack by a notch, until he has cut all the teeth. He has a guide that calibrates each partial rotaion, this make his gears very accurate.
I hope you can understsnd my poor description. Study the small picture and see if you can work out what i mean.
EDIT: see the hands on those clocks, well apparently they are made from Austalian gum tree that has been imersed in water for 100,000 years. The timber is stained by all the minerails and salts of the earth over that time.
I dont know if little things like that are his speil to justify the high price of his clocks, but he is getting orders all around the world. I must say he has found a niche that people are not afraid to spend money on. Who would have thought hey!
I happened to mention to him that I am thinking about making a clock on my CNC machine, he asked what material I would be using. You should have seen the look of horror on his face when I said MDF
