Escapement

With our Italian friend I was concerned about the reassembly and tuning of the balance wheel and hairspring. I took my time making notations and boning up on rebuilding such a beastie. There are many new parts for me to learn about with this movement. Here's a well illuminated example of a similar one. Getting the hairspring, balance wheel, pallet and lever to all be correctly aligned and balance post-surgery was causing me to perhaps over-cram for the test. Finally I screwed up my courage and decided to do the disassembly and give this girl a bath. I worked slowly and took a lot of pictures. Many springs, levers, wheels, pallets and more to be realigned later. Finally got it all laid out. A visual inspection revealed a bent hour hand wheel. Careful application of flat pliers remedied that. The strike train mainspring slipped continuously when winding. Here's why. The mainspring had slipped off it's arbor hook. Might have been an earlier, slo...

Behold what I believe is a hybrid English lever pin pallet clock escapement. A mouthful. It's in there. I checked. Just hard to see from all the sawdust. While not in exchange for services, Yeoman Johnson, master woodworker (and sawdust creator), did ask me to bring his mystery clock back to life. The clock has little history but several intriguing clues: The movement was attached to a wooden faceplate: And yes that is Italian. Forward and Back.  Pretty sure that's not Ed Ricketts on the bottom. In many ways clocks are rather simple things.  A power source turns some gears. Power on older clocks is usually provided either by weights on pulleys or springs wound by hand.  Now the gears of a clock would just spin until the weights fall to the bottom or the springs would just rapidly unwind if they didn't have a regulating device that controls the power and sets the beat of the clock. That device is the clocks escapement...

The cuckoo came backless. If I'm hanging the thing then who'd notice right? Well the back also should have a coiled gong for striking the hour. The sequence of a cuckoo clock striking is: gong, cuckoo, gong, cuckoo, gong... etc. The cuckoo bellows I fixed but this thing needs a gong and therefore a back plate. I suppose I could jury-rig something... but I have a better idea.  I can fix things. I know another guy who knows how to make things. Wooden things. JohnsonArts to the rescue! From plank      To bank! He even beveled the bottom edges to fit the curve of the case slot. 20 minutes top to bottom. Timesavers had the gong: This might just work!

I have spent far too much time researching cuckoos. There are approximately 1 zillion cuckoo's out there made by scores of companies and many of them, especially earlier cuckoo's have little to no identifying manufacturers markings. They're still in production for tourists far and wide and while there are still some made with incredibly high quality many were and are cheap knock offs. I think I've looked at every photo of a cuckoo ever published. Still don't know who made my cuckoo but zeroed in on a date range from the 1890's to about 1915. Probably on the early side of that range. Interesting post to come on the dating effort. Cuckoo's have a few different principle styles. The classic is a typically a brown wooden case with carved birds and leaves. There are chalet styles with figures around a house and hunter styles with a dear heads, rifles and, typically, some draped dead animals. Best examples of the styles come from the Black Forest region of...

Ah. Those are bellows tops. And the shafts are the whistle chambers for the cuckoo. Hey I learn! The reason they were in separate pieces is that the actual bellows material had deteriorated to the point of fully separating from the shafts.  Might have been leather? Removed the shafts from the case. You can see the hole for the air from the bellows and the whistle hole below. OK decision time.  Get new bellows or replace the leather/paper and keep the existing bellows tops and base. Timesavers has replacement bellows  tops.  Here's an interesting tidbit. The bellows tops on this boy are not rectangular rather trapezoidal. The smarties on the NAWCC board say that means old. Tried heat and trimming the glue from the base to see if I could remove the bottom plate of the bellows. No luck. That is some old glue. I fear there's no way to put in new tops without me mashing the hell out of the shafts....

That I'd want to own, much less repair, a cuckoo clock. Welp... At a July estate sale at Pebble Beach I spy this: It's sitting in a cardboard box with several parts and assorted bits loosely jumbled on the bottom. The movement looks ok and the case seems largely intact (albeit in some pieces) but there are parts here that well... I know bupkis from cuckoo's. What are those red things? I debated it and decided to do some research before deciding to buy. I have no idea what the thing is worth or what it will take to repair it. Boy there are a lot of cuckoo's out there and there's not a lot of definitive info immediately available. I came back the next day and bit the bullet, paid half price (whatever that means). Oh and nice place there in Pebble. The house is on the 17th hole. Zowee! Here are some of the pieces in the box: OK I get most of these but those red things I assume are supposed to be attached to the other red things. There w...

Look closely Sinbad. All will be revealed. The hands and dial came off easily. The movement quickly gave up its secret. That is the Seikosha logo. Established in 1892 as the clock making arm of K. Hattori & Co. That is one of, if not the, earliest trademark stamps of the company that would become Seiko. Oh and this on the upper left of the front plate: Kanji? My careful detective work unearthed clues that the Pony Express folks called this model the B19. It was tough to decipher but the clues are there.     What do you think of that wood Dr. Johnson? 1910? Me neither. That said the movement is fairly clean and looks like it was bushed as part of a service but those may be original? It has another ugly solder job too. I wonder if it was roughly serviced sometime in the last 40 years or just put in service this way as Sy the Pony Express were cranking these out. The front glass was redone/done poorly. Perhaps the original was br...