Soldering on

In our last episode your local horologist was making speedy progress (or rather what appears to be so because of the concise nature of the presentation of our posts) on a number of those early repairs of the Thomas Adams English bell strike clock. 

Some readers may know that in a previous life your correspondent served in the technology wars. There is an adage when developing technical systems: 

First get the thing to run, then get it to run well. 

An early principle (and sometimes the first step) of horological repair work is:

First get the thing to run.

And once running assess what additional work is necessary to get the clock to run well.

Our English friend had arrived in a considerably non-running state and accordingly the first few many early rounds of repairs and service were to unblock and enable the thing to actually tick tock, much less run well.

Perhaps your horological raconteur risks overstating the obvious but great care must be taken with very old clocks. Another principle (perhaps Hippocratic in nature) followed by most clockmakers is to preserve and protect original parts as much as reasonably possible during service and repair efforts. 

Exceedingly few replacement parts are available next day on Amazon. Yes there are still some excellent clock suppliers in business today (Timesavers is the current favorite of YLH) but their numbers are diminishing and many elderly clock components have either no replacements or the ones available are of a lesser quality. 

Thus another worthy principle in clock repair is to minimize the nature of the changes needed to enable the healthy running of the clock. Don't, by attempting to go beyond the tenets of this principle, accidentally or unintentionally make things worse.

A clear example of this principle in action and one of the earliest repairs (and a relatively simple one) was addressing the bent pulley. Yes there are pulleys available from Timesavers but your clock doc took great care in the adjusting of the pulley arms of our English friend just enough to ensure that they would clear the pulley wheel and not diminish performance of the device.

These photos don't quite capture the After state perfectly as it does look like a bit of an incomplete effort. The pulley would work fine as depicted but YLH did tweak both sides a bit more (but alas did not capture the result for your enjoyment).

Nevertheless, the point being... This clock doc did not make the effort or take on the additional risk of trying to bend these things to perfect straightness when the end state was absolutely fine for horological health.

Onwards.

Earlier posts referred to Jeff's original notes on the clock when he first evaluated it. One item not captured in the note but discussed very early in our collaboration and heretofore not shared with the kind reader was the clock's suspension spring.

The suspension spring is a key component in the proper the swing of the pendulum. In many clocks the suspension spring is an independent component but with some clocks, and very commonly with English Bell Strike clocks, the suspension spring is directly attached directly to the top of the pendulum. Here is an example with the Peter Green clock.

The problem with our suspension spring on the Thomas Adams clock was... well it was missing.

First, here is the very large and enormously heavy pendulum on the bench.

And a close up of the top of the pendulum reveals that YLH was not completely accurate in his use of the term "missing."

Let's call it "damaged."

There is a bit of spring still pinned to the top of the pendulum. The rest of the spring had clearly left the building. 

Yeah, this pendulum needed a new spring.

Your correspondent has written about suspension springs many times including the fact that Timesavers offers over 100 varieties and thankfully of good quality. But we needed a particular kind. A long, single strip spring with a round top.

Yep, Timesavers has that too.

All that being said, Jeff had a spare.

It even had a pre-drilled pin hole!

All set! 

Pin it boyo!

Right!?

Yeah no.

You see dear reader in horological work rarely are things as simple as they seem.

Look at the photo above again. See that slot in the top brass section of the pendulum?

That slot is important. It engages with the pin on the crutch of the movement. 

This crutch pin.

The slot in the pendulum must align and engage with the crutch pin most precisely. To elucidate further on this engagement your correspondent will refer the reader to an expostulation of this very same effort with the single weight Vienna's crutch pin.

Because the spring is directly connected to the pendulum and it must engage with the crutch pin via that slot the suspension spring must be cut to a specific length.

Ergo the ruler in the photo above.

And many, many measurements were made that ruler (and others).

These are just a sampling.

To be fair there is a bit of wiggle room but your measurer wanted to the crutch pin to land more or less in the middle of the slot.

So this ham-fisted horologist took a shot at it.

The end of the spring was trimmed to measure, a new pin hole was punched and the spring was pinned in place.

Came out pretty good.

Oh and the kind reader may recall that our anchor arbor displayed earlier above was in a sorry state too. YLH is jumping ahead but that repair was another needed just to get this dingus to run. That effort will be shared in a future post.

Back to the spring.

Once pinned to the pendulum an early test of our spring fling revealed...

Shocked? 

Don't judge too harshly. Early efforts with a protractor did indicate an outcome such as this was likely.

At that point in time.

YLH knew there was more work to be done to in other places (like the anchor arbor) to get the pin / slot alignment right. 

Stay tuned!