...I'll clean your clock!

[jethrien]

So I'm now going to wax eloquent on my new very favorite subject:

My clock.


So for my senior independent work, I'm restoring an antique clock from Prospect House (the faculty club). It's a gorgeous old grandfather clock - 8 feet tall, mahogany case, beautiful painted enamel face with a phase-of-the-moon wheel and a date wheel. We've got the date pinned down to somewhere between 1820 and 1840. It hasn't run as long as anyone can remember.

So my advisor (Prof. Littman) and I took the mechanism out of the case and took it over to a clock shop in Pennington this morning. We'd intended mostly to just have a quick consultation with the craftsman, but he seems to have decided to take me under his wing. We ended up taking apart the entire thing, down to the washers. It's currently in about 50 pieces, most of them soaking in an ultrasonic cleaner. I think I'm in love. It's so amazingly cool. The sheer cleverness of these mechanisms is astounding. There's the snail drive, to determine how long the clock strikes (it's like a spiral - the closer it works its way to the center, the longer the weight can keep falling and pull the gear that runs the hammer). There's the tiny little airbrake on the fly - it slows it down so the weight falls at a steady rate. Viscous dampening! And the gear trains, and the moon wheel with 118 teeth (to account for the 29 1/2 days in a lunar cycle) and the reverse minute arm, and the warning arm and and and...ok, I'll stop.

Anyway, it's clear that this has been repaired at least a few times before. And that at least one of the repairers was a total moron. The bushings wore out, for example (sort of like a liner for a hole). So instead of replacing them, the guy took a tap and basically hammered at the brass around each hole until it warped enough to hold the pin. And there's a whole bunch of holes drilled for no discernable reason (we think maybe someone tried to put the gears back on and screwed up and redrilled the holes several times). There were washers where there shouldn't have been any, and one that was actually upside down. We ended up taking a lot of photographs, if nothing else but to prove that we didn't do it.

So I'm going back on Monday, and we're going to polish the pins and start layering some of this back together. We ordered new weights and a pendulum, since they were both missing from the original clock. Oh, this is so cool. I love my independent work! (I'll probably love it less later when I'm trying to do the actual math and modelling, but right now I'm tinkering and happy.)

Whee!

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