As an amateur clock repairer, I’ve been hunting for a good glossary of clock part names. Then one day I found clock conservator Matthew Read talked about one in his How to repair pendulum clocks – LIVESTREAM #005, where at about 1:26:00 he mentions a 17th or 18th Century work by William Derham. One of the live-stream attendees found the title of that work.
What follows is Chapter 1 of “The Artificial Clockmaker” by William Derham, published in 1734, courtesy of Google Books. This chapter gives the then-current names and descriptions of the parts of a mechanical clock. Many of these names have survived into the 21st Century. Where necessary I’ve added annotations in brackets.
I recently bought my first pinion wires (pivot wires) from Timesavers, and was stumped for a while about how to store the tiny things without mixing them up.
Sometimes I can be too enthusiastic in repairing a clock. For example, I have a Regula 25 cuckoo clock movement that I bought on eBay, to practice repairing cuckoo clocks. In the process of cleaning it, I polished the scratches off of the ends of two levers – a bad idea.
I haven’t done any clock repair lately because I’m (still) (slowly) working on my clockmaker’s bench. The nearly-last step is to glue a linoleum surface to the bench top, which will probably have to wait until warmer weather.
UPDATE: I finished the bench at about December of 2024, and am working on clock again – yay!
Each clock repairer seems to have their own favorite method for cleaning their clocks. Some prefer mineral spirits; some like ammoniated cleaners; some like dish detergent. Because I’m just starting out, my particular cleaning process is evolving. This post covers my current process and recipes.
While waiting for its case to be repaired, my craft-altered Ansonia Derby clock has been running on a test stand – off and on for quite a while. I noticed that every great once in a while the count lever failed to drop into the 8 o’clock slot, causing the number of hours struck to be incorrect from then on.
The problem was that the count lever needed adjusting so the lever wouldn’t hang up on the walls of the slot it was dropping into. In this post I describe my adventure of adjusting (bending) the count lever.
…or why you should learn to maintain your own clock.
So you’re looking at that clock in the antique mall window. Perhaps it’s a lovely old Sessions Black Mantel clock, with lion heads and metal arches. It runs, and it’s only $90, so you take it home.
It’s taken me a while to learn some basic metallurgy that I need for clock repair. When I started I scratched up my brass clock plates by cleaning with SOS pads – steel wool – because I didn’t know that steel is harder than brass. In this post I collect what I’ve picked up in this metals game of Scissors, Paper, Rock.
In August I bought an old, 7-drawer student’s desk at a garage sale. Since then I’ve been converting it to a clockmaker’s bench. This note is a quick update; I plan to write a full, how-to booklet once I’ve completed it.
I learned amateur clock repairers often make their own benches, starting from a solid writing desk. I bought mine at a garage sale.
