Firstly, apologies for no blogs in September and October; a very dear friend was gravely ill and my spare time was very limited so very little clock repairing was possible. She passed away a few weeks ago, age 63, after losing a ten year cancer battle.

This month brought my first ever disgruntled clock owner. I thought my website made it very clear that clock repairing is just a hobby, something I do in my spare time, and that if a fast repair is needed it’s best to look elsewhere. In return, I charge almost nothing to save moribund clocks from the graveyard because I enjoy breathing new life into them and seeing the faces of the owners when the get them back afterwards, working properly again. I almost never take anything by way of a deposit, funding all the costs of a repair myself.  Maybe I’m just ‘old school’ but I do helping people without trying to take advantage all the time.

So this grandaughter clock came to me for a repair in February – a three train 1920′s German factory movement; the sort of thing it’s difficult to get too excited about. It had sat somewhere not working for over five years until someone finally decided to get it fixed and as I was cheaper than anyone else they could find, it came to me.

Well it was full of cobwebs, dried up oil and dirt and I have quite a few other clocks to finish first so it sat in the corner for weeks undergoing tests while still in the case to see what adjustments would be required. Eventually I took the movement out and cleaned it and then tested it. After that I updated the owner who suggested I hold onto it for a while longer to make sure it runs to time.

By October I was confident that it would be reliable but it was another month before the owner finally collected it. In an email just before coming he said my charges represented good value but he wanted a discount because it had ‘taken an extraordinary amount of time for the clock to be fixed’.  Well, I don’t do discounts because there’s no profit in this for me to discount. Every penny is spent of cleaning fluids, maintaining the website, replacing and repairing tools, maintaining the lathes and other equipment, and so on. And I don’t do haggling either because my rates are way below anyone else and I don’t need the hassle of dealing with people who are always looking for something for next to nothing.

Given that the clock had sat uncared for for five years or more, hadn’t been serviced for even longer and even sat here for a month waiting to be collected after it was ready, and that the owner knew at the outset that horology is just a spare time hobby, this appeal for a discount all sounded a little disingenuous so I simply suggested he accept it as a gift.

He did. Not even an attempt to make some contribution to my costs when he eventually collected it. No mention of it at all.  Evidently, not everyone went to my ‘old school’.

I’d been trying to arrange a visit to the Palace of Westminster for four years; applications must be made through your local MP but mine had never replied. This year I tried again and finally got to see inside the clock tower on my birthday. It’s well worth a visit, whether you’re interested in clocks or just London’s colourful history.

There’s a lot of detail and data on my Big Ben page (see the photo link on my Home page) and you can get more from the official Parliament website. But what I want to do here is to explain what you can expect. The tour begins in Portcullis House opposite the tower (nearest tube: Westminster). After the issue of a photo ID card, a bag scan and body search you’ll wait in the foyer surrounded by a good many Police wearing side arms and carrying fully automatic weapons.

The guide then arrives and explains that there are 334 concrete steps to the top and asks about any high blood pressure, pregnancies, surgical operations and other conditions that could restrict you, before crossing under the road to the Tower. The climb then begins and it’s not for the feint-hearted but with a couple of pauses along the way, it’s not too bad and on the way you’ll hear the bells chime the half hour.

At the first resting point, the guide will give a background history for about ten minutes in the unofficial Prison Room used to detain naughty MPs. If you wish, you can leave excess baggage here before continuing upwards until you reach the clock movement where you’ll hear tales of pennies, tragedies, and tireless clock-keepers who still wind the going train by hand three times a week. You’ll also get a glimpse of the dials outside through small windows and watch/hear the clock chime the third quarter. The loud clicking sound afterwards is the fly (air brake) on the chime train slowing down on its ratchet. A ratchet was fitted after it broke and sent the tonne weight to the ground in record time, while causing the wheels to fly across the room in what, at the time, was thought to be an explosion that warranted to attendence of the Bomb Squad.

Further up and you’ll eventually find yourself in the open bell tower where you’ll use ear plugs to control the deafening sound of the five bells as the four quarters sound and the hours are counted on Big Ben itself.  Note that this is BB2 as the first bell never made it to the top because it cracked after testing and was destroyed to make the new lighter bell (which also cracked under test but was repaired). On a good day, the views across London are fantastic; on a bad day, it’s wet and windy so take a jacket.

Then it’s back down to the previous level to walk round (and touch) the insides of the four glass dials when you’ll hear the first quarter chime again before returning to the Prison Room to hear more about the naming of the bell and other historic anecdotes. Finally, you’ll descend to ground level again, the whole tour taking around an hour and a half.

There’s no lift, and there’s no cafe or other place for refreshment in Portcullis House so have something to eat and drink before you arrive. And remember that photography is no longer permitted anywhere during the tour.

To arrange a tour contact your MP via http://www.parliament.uk/visiting/visiting-and-tours/bigben/

With apologies for a somewhat late July blog.

This month left me faced with a double-dilemma.

A chap sent me a brass carriage clock with a common enough French movement fitted. The case top was dented, the front and side glasses chipped and a screw had been fitted to the back door to replace the usual turned brass knob that had long since disappeared.

If that wasn’t enough, there was the usual problem – it didn’t work either. Only this time the clock was accompanied by a request is to fit a new quartz movement.

Well, I took a look at the existing movement and the all-important lever escapement looked like it could be persuaded to run so here’s my first dilemma; do I offer to dismantle, service and clean the antique inheritance, or do I simply remove a perfectly restorable antique movement and fit a new battery quartz movement instead?

I trembled at the thought of chucking in a nice plastic box and battery so I asked the owner if he would consider a repair instead. His wife, who inherited the clock from her father apparently liked the sound of getting the original one ticking again, he replied. So that was me out of an horological hole – I am now to restore it and my horological soul remains intact.

But it doesn’t. Soon afterwards the client emailed again to say that he didn’t really want it restored so could I just say it can’t be done and fit the quartz movement anyway. Dilemma number two. Can I come between a man and his wife and join in a conspiracy with one to help deceive the other?

I’d managed to sidestep the risk of selling my soul only to find myself in the worse position of selling my concience instead.

Faust had it easy.

Sorry about last month’s omission, followers. I took a breather in May and went on holiday. But I’m back for June.

Now, when I clean a clock movement, I tend to do it the old-fashioned way using a warm, mild ammonia solution. To speed thing up a bit I use ultrasonic tanks which create tiny bubbles that burst when they come into contact with the parts through a process known as cavitation. This action shakes all the dirt loose.

The tanks cost £550 for the smaller one and £1,600 for the big one so I was really surprised to find on a certain online auction site a product that claims to do the same for £15. Just place the special sheet of metal in the bottom of a sink, pour two heaped tablespoons of ordinary washing soda onto it, add very hot water to it to dissolve the soda and then place the tarnished items on top so that they make contact with the metal sheet. Then, hey presto! Fifteen seconds later, remove the item and rinse in soapy water and dry. All the dirt from your clock has magically transferred to the metal plate so just rinse that next with some sudsy water under the hot tap and put it away for next time.

If this works, it’s gonna make ultrasonic tanks look positively slow and sales of Horolene will plummet.

Well, it seems it might actually work! But a bit of Googling reveals that the process is supposed to be for silver items, not brass clock parts. The oxidisation of silver (the tarnish) is black sulphide and all you need is some clean aluminium foil and bicarbonate of soda (common baking powder). If you did chemistry at school, you’ll probably this equation:

2Al(s) + 3Ag₂S(s) + 6H₂O -> 6Ag(s) + 2Al₂(OH)₃(s) + 3H₂S(aq)

If you don’t remember it, try this: Pour some warm water into a container [6H₂O], add a couple of spoonfuls of the baking powder [3Ag₂S(s)] and finally in goes the foil [2Al(s)] . Place the silver items into the solution in contact with the foil and then remove after ten or fifteen seconds and rinse it off. Job done!

Now I haven’t tried this yet as all out cutlery is dishwasher-safe stainless steel. But if yours is silver, try it and tell me what you think. But if the spoons dissolve or disintegrate, don’t blame me; blame Wikipedia.

See you in July.

In April a chap, say Ferdinand, brought in a 30 hour longcase clock movement because the chain kept slipping round the sprockets on the two main wheels – a common enough problem caused by wear.

The trouble is that most of these weight-driven clocks started life with a rope to drive the wheels, but the ropes fray quite quickly as the spikes on the sprockets grip and release them. So most ropes needed replacing frequently. They also cause a lot of unwanted dust fibres in the movement, which sticks to the oil and dries out the pivot holes. So most owners have opted to replace the worn out rope with longer-lasting metal chain and this was no exception.

The particular problem was that the sprockets were original; there were just five spikes on each and they were worn and not designed for chain so they were too short and only two spikes were in contact with the chain at any one time. It needed new sprockets designed for a chain, plus a new chain, which I supplied and fitted using the existing cheeks to retain as much originality as possible.

Then while the movement was in pieces I agreed to clean the pivots and pivot holes and re-oil them. The owner collected the movement but when he got it home, he  re-fitted the dial and hands and put it back into the trunk himself. Next day he rang to say that the clock would not go and the strike would not stop.

The only way to sort this was to see the movement in action in situ, which I offered to do free of charge. I found that the pin on the strike wheel was now bent flat and it soon became obvious that it was suffering from metal fatigue and needed to be replaced. So I agreed to replace it free of charge, on site. This is not a small job as it entails stripping the movement again and I learnt from this not to reassemble a job on the bench without checking all the parts (even if I was not being paid to check them). Had I done so, I would have spotted the damage and fitted a new pin before assembly and collection. That was the strike problem sorted.

As I refitted the dial, I replaced the nails and split pins with proper steel taper pins, and I also added a new domed washer to the rather loose minute hand. Then, once the movement was installed, I could hear that it was out of beat. Some clocks will run like that and as this one was screwed to the wall, I guess it must have for many years. But there is a very great risk of it stopping, as indeed this one had evidently done. So I adjusted the crutch manually and set it in beat for this particular clock case, which of course I had not seen before. Again, no charge.

When I left the clock was running well again and it still is. The owner is delighted but I’ve learnt also not to expect an owner to be able to set up a longcase clock himself so henceforth I insist on attrending to the set up personally. It’s quicker and cheaper for me in the long run.

Another lesson learned.

I had a call this week from a local clock repairer. Sticking with my sequential use of the alphabet, let’s call him ’Eustace’. Eustace explained that he had  spent the day cleaning a friend’s clock. Having got it going again, he’d put the movement back into its wooden case but he had a problem – he was clean out of clock oil. Did I have any spare oil to help him out?

Now oil’s not expensive, but it’s not cheap either, not the quality stuff I use anyway. And it’s widely available online at a number of suppliers who’ll deliver next day. So I reminded him, as any repairer would already know, that there were many types of oil, and different viscosities were needed for different parts of a clock and different clock types, but he insisted he needed some today and that any type would do.

This is all very odd, I thought. The amount of oil needed for a clock was so tiny that you don’t just suddenly run out of oil and you don’t just have one bottle anyway.  I suspected that he had never bought or used clock oil before, which meant that he could not be a serious repairer at all, so I quizzed him some more. “What do you use to apply the oil and where do you apply it?”, I asked. He used a matchstick and added oil to all the moving parts! “Not the wheels and pinions? I challenged. “What do you mean by ‘pinions’?” came the unexpected response. “Is it a timepiece?” I asked, “or a two or three train movement? And how are you going to oil the front pivots now that you’ve already screwed the movement back in the case?”.

“I don’t understand what you mean.” By now, I had detected a Scottish accent so perhaps he just didn’t want to pay for his oil. But he was persistent so I offered to assist and a couple of hours later, he appeared at the door. “What did you use to clean the movement? I enquired, tempting him with a small phial of oil in my hand. “WD40″ came the instant reply, as though all clock repairers use it.

Argh! WD40 is wholly unsuitable for clocks and the image of Eustace spraying it all over the fully assembled movement sent a shudder down my spine. “WD40 contains all manner of chemicals that clocks don’t like” I explained. No repairer would even be seen with a can in his workshop, let alone use it on a clock. On the contrary, I have spent many an hour trying to remove all trace of WD40 (including that distinctive smell) from a movement.

Heaven only knows what the impact is of mixing clock oil with WD40 but this clock is moribund already so what the heck! I  handed Eustace the £10 phial free of charge and told him that he had no idea about clock repairing. Still, he left happy and smiling.

This was my first face-to-face contact with uncle Bodger, the ubiquitous “friend who knows all about clocks” to whom people entrust their treasured heirlooms, just to save a few pounds.

Useless Eustace!

Would you believe it? I have worked on and repaired the clocks in my collection inside these four walls in complete isolation for the best part of thirty five years. Then I wrote a website just for fun and almost immediately began to receive requests to repair other people’s clocks in and around Billericay, my home town. Then the word spread further afield, taking off across all of Essex. Next people were travelling from neighbouring Kent, then Kingston upon Thames.

I’ve since had enquiries from Newcastle and Rotherham, and then just before Christmas, Northern Ireland. Next it was Germany.  And then a chap brought in a 400 day clock for me to prepare for him to take to the Middle East, carrying it in his hand luggage (not ticking though!). Word quickly spread round that region , for soon afterwards I had an enquiry from a collector in Oud Metha in Dubai (before the troubles broke out).  This month, I’m helping  Doc, an enthusiast in Tanzania off the coast of Australia, who shares my utter dismay at the lack of service and support offered by L’Epée, a Swiss firm that started making carriage clocks almost 200 years ago and now seems to keep changing hands as frequently as a Premier League footballer.

John Harrison (he of “Longitude” fame who made an accurate sea-going clock rendering international navigation much safer, long before satnav) would have been blown away by this internet thing; it’s truly amazing. You type a page up that has no tangible existence, send it into cyberspace where it is mysteriously filed with billions and billions of similarly invisible pages, and then someone on the other side of the world searches for some of its content, not even knowing that it’s there, finds it and communicates with the author by email all in less time than Mr Harrison took to get out his Jacot tool.

Who’d have thought it? Certainly not Harrison, methinks!

A lady brought me a small reproduction bracket clock late yesterday afternoon. It was a gift from her father three years ago but unfortunately it had never worked. Now living in Germany, she tried repeatedly to get it repaired locally. The last repairer had it for six months but still couldn’t fix it. Their expert, Claus, was emphatic: “Nein, zis eez unt Ingleesh clokken, und ve carnot get ze parts” he exclaimed!

She was due to return to Germany next day so while she was here, I opened it up to find a small but clean balance wheel movement inside. I could tell that it had been dismantled before by the marks on the screw heads and I said I thought it curious that the platform, supporting the jewelled lever escapement, was the wrong way round so that the regulator arm was impossible to access through the regulator slot in the back. I explained that I’d need to look at it more closely so I agreed to have it ready before her next visit to the UK in March.

After dinner, I released the tension in the mainspring and looked at it again. By applying a little pressure on the wheels, I got the clock running but there was a serious flaw- it ran backwards! It didn’t need any parts; Claus had simply rebuilt the movement back to front.

In a clock movement, the escapement controls the speed with which the escape wheel turns and in this clock that was a contrate wheel, which is a special gear on which the teeth are cut sideways into it, rather than vertically. It’s common on carriage clocks that have a balance wheel lever escapement mounted on a platform on top and reminds me of  the crown wheel in early verge movements on which it might be derived.

I saw that the pinion was in the centre of the arbor, which is a little unusual so I rebuilt the movement, reversing the contrate wheel so that it was now facing the back instead of the front, and that enabled me to fit the platform the correct way round. A few adjustments later and the clock was running again.

It just goes to show that sometimes you can’t see the problem even though it’s staring you in the face. The delighted owner collected it this morning on her way back to Germany.   Job completed in under a day.

England 1, Germany Nil.

Auf  Wiedersehen,

Well, not long till Christmas now. Yet still the good folk of Essex keep ringing for advice and guidance on fixing their clocks. And the word’s spreading – a chap in Newcastle called last week for advice about starting a 400 day clock collection and then a nice fella in Northern Ireland rang in the late evening at the weekend – just to talk horology for a while. Don’t they know it’s Christmas?

It’s getting colder now so to reflect the change in weather, I thought I’d add a bit of falling snow to my website. Getting the javascript to create snow effect was easy but it prompted me to ‘fix’ the website’s timeclock on the same page. I had previously downloaded some Flash code and images from the internet and set it up a couple of years ago when modernising the site; whoever designed it knew more about Flash than me, but a lot less about clocks (like whoever designed this WordPress template – the wheels could never actually turn because they are all interlocked!). In fact it was more like a pocket watch without a case than a clock and is quite commonly found on t’internet. A lot of things irritated me about it – that seconds dial, the lack of any case, the mismatched hands, the absence of any name… So I set about making my own last week. For the dial and case I photographed a fusee dial clock that I have here for repair at the moment and saved it as a jpg. Using Fireworks, I then airbrushed out the logo and superimposed ‘horologica’ and Billericay’ in text over the top. I also drew the hands in Fireworks, modelling them on the actual hands from the same clock to maintain authenticity. I then found some ActionScript and modified it because the minute hand only moved once every sixty seconds (like a quartz clock). As you can see, it now resembles the slow but continuous movement of the 19 century fusee movement that it is based on. The graphics still need some work but I much prefer it to the previous pocket watch, particularly as I don’t repair pocket watches! So, that’s another clock fixed, albeit with different tools from what I’m used to.

Have a great one!