The gears that go from each stepper motor to the gears on the shafts are in a ratio of 1:1, which means for every step the stepper motor moves the gear and its associated shaft moves the same number of degrees.

Here lies the first major issue I ran into. The stepper motors are geared to improve torque and accuracy. The gear ratio in them determines the number of steps that must be completed to do one revolution. For these motors this turns out to be 512 steps per revolution. Why 512? If you deal with computers and programming you may have an idea as 512 is 2^9 (two to the 9th power), a nice "round" number to a computer. I had a devil of a time getting the clock to move its hands correctly because 512 does not divide by the number of minutes in an hour (60) or any of the numbers associated with time keeping. I did get the code to work but every hour I had to skip ahead a few ticks of the hands to keep proper time.

Since I had the ability to make gears of any size or tooth configuration it occurred to me that I could change the number of steps per revolution from 512 to something more "clock friendly" like 360. If I attached a 512 tooth gear to each stepper motor and a 360 tooth gear to each gear on the central shaft it would take six ticks of the stepper to move one minute with no more hourly adjustment issues! Problem solved & code simplified.