It rains a lot in Nannup. The small timber town in south-western Western Australia, population of just over 1,300, receives almost a metre of rainfall a year. For a builder like Kevin Bird, that means a lot of days when it’s too wet to work.

It could be an opportunity to catch up on the accounts, or even leave off work for the day and read a book. Instead, Bird used his wet-weather days to build the largest wooden pendulum clock in the world.

He started small, making made-to-order wooden grandfather clocks out of the workshop on his farm.

Then the timber industry started facing pressure from environmental groups, and Bird, frustrated by a perception that Nannup timber was only used for “wood chips and railway sleepers”, decided upon the perfect protest: a really, really big clock.

“It sounded like a good idea at the time, but it was a bit like a wart that just kept growing,” he said.

The finished clock is six metres tall, weighs two tonnes and took more than a decade to build.

This month, 15 years after it first began – after a string of rejections, a failed community centre proposal and “six months of crying” – the wooden clock went on display in a purpose-built 14-metre-tall clocktower in the town centre: the highest point on the Nannup skyline.

It joins Australia’s ever-growing list of big things.

“It seems to be very, very popular,” Bird said. “It has gone full circle. But I could have done without all the bullshit.”

The six-metre clock is now housed in a specially built clock tower in the centre of the town. Photograph: Heather Walford/The Nannup Clock Tower

The project began in 2004, with a promise that it would be housed in a new Nannup community centre. When the centre lost the backing of the Nannup shire council, Bird was lost.

“I was devastated,” he said. “I was left with a pile of bits and nowhere for it to go. I probably cried for about six months, and then after a while I thought, ‘nothing is changing, and you have to go do something about it yourself’.”

With the encouragement of his wife, Margaret, he kept going, and built a new extra-tall shed in order to finish construction.

There it stood for four years until it was dismantled and painstakingly moved into the new Nannup clocktower, run by local businesswoman Heather Walford.

Bird snuck in earlier this week and watched some tourists admiring his handiwork from the viewing platform.

“The one that surprised me the most is the women,” he said. “I never ever thought that a woman would appreciate something like that, because it’s a mechanical thing, it’s a bit blokey. But it’s the opposite – they are looking at it as a beautiful piece of kinetic art, and it makes the most wonderful sound of wood hitting wood.”

He holds the phone up to a wooden grandfather clock in the living room of his home on an acerage a few kilometres out of town, and lets the ticking play down the line.

“Hear that?” he says. “That’s wood on wood.”

The largest single gear in the big clock is just over a metre in diameter, and 50mm thick. The frame is made from locally cut jarrah while the mechanism was made with laminated western she-oak, a “very durable and stable wood” cut from the gnarled trunks of Allocasuarina fraseriana, a little coastal species often stunted by sea breezes.

Bird learned to build clocks while working as an aircraft engineer for now-defunct airline Ansett Australia in the 1960s, when it still used some Douglas DC-3 and DC-4 aircraft left over from the second world war.

“They all had wind-up chronometers in the instrument panel as a final back-up to determine position and longitude,” he said. “I used to service them and I hated the bloody things. But how a clock works? I know all about that.”