Clocks and Clockmaking

Work on the skeleton clock has continued this week but I have spent quite a lot of time watching auctions on e-Bay for cases for grandfather clocks. The prices that are being realised are amazing! There was one case that fetched £450 and several have reached over £300.

There is even one unfinished case on offer at £250 that the seller states is less than the cost price of the oak it is made out of. This means that the material cost of the case is greater than the material cost of the movement. The Hipp movement clock now running in our dining room has less than £100 of material in it, even allowing for the amount of scrap that ended up in the bin during the learning process.

There is a fair amount of work to do on tooling before I can think about building another clock from scratch. In particular I need to construct a better way of cutting wheels than I have used in the past. The Hipp movement did not need many wheels and I used a fairly crude dividing mechanism to cut thbasicallyicly wooden disks with band-saw blade around the perimeter mounted on the lather headstock. The method works but it is very easy to make a mistake and the backlash between saw teeth can cause inaccuracies. Tony Jeffree has published a design for a simple dividing head suitable for use with my Taig/Peatol lathe and I think I will build something along those lines. I might look on e-Bay first though!

Categories: Clocks, Clockmaking

Great Season Ahead

I spent most of yesterday at Shelsley Walsh with the annual MAC working party getting the hill and the facilities ready for the forthcoming season.

I was one of 65 members who turned up to 'do their bit' towards making the venue look it's best for it's 101st year. This was my fifth or sixth working party and there seems to be more helpers each year, so more people to chat to and more work gets done. The only constant is the beer, which could not be any more welcome than it was the first time I went!

To be able to walk and drive up the oldest motor sport track in the world is a delight and I have found that getting involved in the pre-season clear up really adds to the pleasures of the competetive meetings. It is much easier to understand why some drivers lift off at certain points on the hill when others don't when you know that the apex of a bend is invisible to a driver on the track even though it is quite obvious from the spectator enclosure. The raw gradient of the hill is also much more apparent when you are walking up it.

The first meeting of the season is May 13th & 14th and I'm really looking forward to it!

Categories: Hillclimbing, Motoring

The Tin-Windscreen Brigade

There is an article in today's Times about drivers getting stuck in a deep ford because their sat-nav tells them it is OK. There have been similar stories in the media for some time and they all fall into the same category.

The Tin-Windscreen Brigade.

I coined this term for those drivers who are so confident in the ability of the motoring technology to keep them safe that they don't need to have glass in the windscreen because they don't look out through it!

This trend first appeared amongst a minority of 4x4 drivers some years ago but the effect is becoming widespread. It is typified by a clear lack of awareness of what is happening around them and can be mistaken for bloody-minded selfishness but is actualy much more dangerous. An extreme example, observed in a Birmingham street, was a driver who drove straight through a line of children crossing the road under the supervison of a school crossing patrol. By the grace of God no-one was hurt.

When I was taught to drive, back in 1963, if you had an accident it hurt. I can confirm that from painful experience, and it did make me a more careful driver. I also rode motorcycles for a number of years and that taught me even more about how to stay in one piece on the roads. Now we have air-bags, seat-belts, crumple zones and side-impact protection. We can even preserve our no-claim bonuses so driving into something at 30 mph does not even hurt us in the wallet!

So please can we make a 5 year apprenticeship on motorcycles compulsory for all able-bodied drivers before they can have a car license. The survivors will be much better car drivers and it might reduce some of the traffic congestion.

Categories: Motoring, Humour

Sore Fingers

Work continues on the skeleton clock, but has slowed down a little. Before I retired I would would spend an hour or so in the evenings working with hand tools and my small lathe but now I am spending several hours at a time at the workbench.

It is a delight to have the time to spend on what I find is an absorbing hobby but I am having trouble with sore fingers while my skin hardens up a bit. At least I can turn to the web and research ideas and materials. Browsing e-Bay is always amazing, I never cease to be astonished by what people will buy.

When we go to Clock Fairs there are obvously many amateur and professional clock and watch enthusiasts in the UK but they do seem to be more web-shy than their American counterparts, because much of my web-based research leads me to US web-sites, even for English makers. If there are English horologists out there thta disagree I would love to be proved wrong.

Categories: Clocks, Clockmaking

Its Good Friday so we went to church. When we came out the car was well heated up so as soon as we got home the hard-top came off.

After several months packed away the soft top unfolded as smoothly as ever with a gentle whine of hydraulics. It still looks OK, no obvious deterioration over the winter, wonderful. We will await the next rain with interest.

Once we had checked the condition of the soft-top we stored the hard-top in it's summer storage slung from the roof of the garage. Happy but tired (it is a heavy lift for two pensioneers) we retired for a cup of tea.

Categories: Classiccars

More work on the Skeleton

After 14 hours work spread over 3 days I have got the front frame of the skeleton clock ready to polish. I hope you can see the difference!

While I have been filing and sanding in amongst the detail, the little anniversary clock has been running happily at the back of the bench. I have bought a key for from Cousins Masterial House for the princely sum of £1.50 + VAT. I have used Cousins for tools and supplies since I took up this hobby and they have always been reliable. They also sell clock and watch batteries, including the sizes that my car alarm remote control uses, at prices that highlight the markup on the High Street. For most sizes a box of ten batteries costs the same as a single battery from my local shops.

I am going to have to find a glass dome for the skeleton clock, which is what I was looking for on e-Bay when I bought the anniversary clock. If anyone knows of a good source I would love to hear from you

Categories: Clocks, Clockmaking

Skeleton Clock - Work in Progress

Much activity at the workbench after yesterday's news. The anniversary clock is responding well to being adjusted and is now keeping better time and I have put in several hours work on the front frame of the skeleton clock.

The more I work on this clock the better I like it but I can see why makers hold skeltons in such awe. There is an awful lot of work involved in getting the frames bright without rounding-off any of the webs. These casting do have one or two quite deep defects on the inner face that are going to need some careful work but it will all be worth it.

The kit came fully assembled and ran beautifully with a very quiet action, so I can hardly wait to get it all polished and rebuilt.

Categories: Clocks, Clockmaking

Grandfather Clock

Clear the workbench, I must make a grandfather clock. We have just heard that we are going to be grandparents in October. Fantastic news and brilliant timing being told on Margaret's birthday.

Now I need plans or designs for a 30 day longcase movement and a suitable case.

Categories: Clocks, Clockmaking, Grandchild

Unexpected progress

On Friday I wrote about a Kern & Sohne anniversary clock I had bought as a 'non-runner'. Well, after taking photos for the blog I had a good look and decided to let down the mainspring to take the load off the pivots in an attempt to detect any excessive play.

First discovery was that the clock winds up anticlockwise. Obvious now I think about it because the winder is at the back of the clock, so winds clockwise when view from the front.

The second discovery was that the spring was almost fully unwound, it only had one turn of tension in it. I did the obvious thing and wound it up fully.

That was at 5pm on Friday and it is still going quite happily. It has lost about five minutes in 48 hours, but there is a regulator mechanism on the rotor so I will try that. Time will tell.

Categories: Clocks, Clockmaking

Retired!

I woke up this morning and did not have to go to work, just like every Friday this year. The difference this morning was that I will not go to work on Monday or Tuesday or any other day of the week because retirement day has finally arrived.

There are so many things that I want to do, some of them I need to do to stretch my pension further and some of them just because I want to do them. In both cases I will be doing things in my own time and at my own pace. I think that time is life's greatest luxury and one of my hobbies is dealing with the means of measuring the passage of time. Earlier posts show a clock I have made and a clock I am working on.

In this post I am introducing an e-Bay purchase, described by the seller as clockwork, only runs for 15 minutes. I can't complain about his description, which is perfectly accurate as far as it goes. It appears to be a torsion pendulum anniversary clock, manufactured in Germany. I think the maker is Kern & Sohne and it seems to be well made but is in need of a thourough cleaning. A visual inspection reveals streaks of oil on the plates which suggests that someone has over-oiled the pivots and probably gummed things up nicely. I shall have great fun dismantling and cleaning this little clock when I have finished the skeleton clock. Even if I make a mess of it I will learn something and my winning bid was not even in double figures!

Categories: Clocks, Clockmaking

Donnington dash

Excellent run to The Donnington Grand Prix Collection. The weather was showery but there were many sunny intervals that showed of the countryside to great effect.

As ever, the run was well organised and the route interesting, mostly B roads and rural A roads. At one point we came over the brow of a hill and the scenery before us could have come straight out of a hunting print, only without the horses. We covered about 74 miles on the run and it took us just on two hours with only one comfort stop along the way

The SL wasn't the newest car on the run, but is pictured here amongst some more traditional motors, some of which ran 'topless' in spite of the showers. As you can see, we chickened out and left the hard-top in place. The cars ranged from a 1927 Salmsom and a 1933 Aston Martin Le Mans at the older end to a virtually new BMW Z4. MG and Morgan were well represented as ever.

Its not surprising that this run went so smoothly. The MAC is after all one of the oldest motor clubs and operates the oldest motor sport venue in the world, namely Shelsley Walsh hillclimb, that was used for the first time in August 1905 and event have been run ever since over the same course. The Centenary Event last year has recently been nominated Event of the Yera by Classic & Sportscar Magazine.

Categories: ClassicCars, HillClimbing

Why build clocks?

One week ago we changed our clocks one hour forward for British Summer Time and today my first clock is still showing the correct time. This was a pleasant surprise!

Once upon a time every clockmaker would have had a regulator clock in his workshop against which he could set new and repaired timepieces. Now we have radio controlled clocks that regulate themselves by reference to world standard clocks. Perfect accuracy but where’s the romance?

My No. 1 clock keeps time when it feels like it, sometimes makes strange noises and generally behaves like an unruly pet. In other words it almost seems to be a living thing even though I know every component intimately because I shaped it from the original material, sometimes after several attempts.

One part that took several attempts to get right was the daisy wheel motion work. I first read about this in an article by John Wilding in Model Engineer magazine (Issue 4179, 4 October 2002) and decided to try using it on my own clock.

The first attempt was based on the drawings in John Wilding’s article but I could not get it to work. I then sat down and used CAD to draw dozens of possible positions for the pins and effectively define the required shape for the daisy wheel. This revealed my errors in scaling from Mr Wilding’s article and also provided me with a way of transferring the drawing to the metal by printing the drawing onto an adhesive label.

Even then it took me two goes before I ended up with a combination of daisy wheel and pin wheel that worked. Now, if I need to know the exact time I can check the soulless electronic alarm clock but I much prefer seeing the approximate time on a clock that I brought to life myself.

clockmaking