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.

The repairs started off innocently enough: someone had replaced two levers’ original clips with huge E-clips, which I felt were ugly.

A little while later an order from Timesavers.com arrived, which included a set of 10 Regula E-clips, and I replaced the ugly replacement clips with the proper clips. All was well, and the sun was shining on this clock movement.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t let it go at that. I noticed that the two levers’ ends had been scratched up by previous repairers, so I was eager to polish out that damage.

After polishing out that lever damage, I reassembled the movement – or tried to. By polishing the ends of those two levers, I had made those ends too small to be gripped by the original clips. I learned a sad lesson about the tight tolerances in clock movements, and that “polishing” removes material.

I tried finding clips to fit the newly-smaller ends of the levers. the Imperial-sized E-clips I had didn’t fit, so I ordered an assortment of metric E-clips, “Split Tension Washer – Metric”, from Timesavers.

2 mm split tension washers worked great! Tip: to create the necessary end-shake in the levers, I temporarily placed a larger clip under the end of the lever before pressing the clip on the other end with pliers.

(I should have put a paper card underneath the pliers to avoid further scratching the plate)

So this cuckoo clock movement is doing its job: teaching me how to repair a cuckoo clock without causing further damage to the clock.