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Clocks

Clocks

(OP)
I had a faux regulator clock hanging on my kitchen wall and it fell to the floor a couple of days ago when I was adjusting the time for the end of DST (yes, I was a bit behind on this). The clock is nothing special: quartz movement, MDF construction for the housing, etc. I am thinking about replacing it instead of cobbling it back together and wanted suggestions on what sort of wall clock might be appropriate for an engineer. I like the railroad style regulator clocks but am not limiting myself to that style.

RE: Clocks

How about a computer generated Sun Dial on a flat screen. You can also have the exact time in a digital inset.

Bill
--------------------
"Why not the best?"
Jimmy Carter

RE: Clocks

I have one of those so-called 'atomic' digital clocks in my home office which is linked to the WWV shortwave radio time signal so it's always correct (including changing for DST). It also has both indoor and outdoor temps (with a remote sensor unit that's mounted outside my office window).

That being said, we also have a very nice schoolhouse regulator in the formal living room which I have to wind every 30 days.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

RE: Clocks

I have been thinking about a 24 hr movement, in a regulator type case.

Given my history with utility's I would love to find a Warren Master B.
http://www.skinnerinc.com/auctions/2600M/lots/321

When I saw the title, I was hoping you were announcing your hobby of clock repair. I need someone to put back together a 1934 Ingrahm mantle that the local "repair expert" handed back to me in a paper sack :(

RE: Clocks

An engineers clock to me would evoke fascination and reflect interest in areas not necessarily one's chosen career, yet gave an appreciation of the skill, engineering and dedication it took to become proficient in those fields.

My "Altimeter Clock" below, while not a nice antique or particularly fancy... reflects above thought to me and memories of an older brother's early 50's era aviation and training at a small, one man A & E mechanic run local air field... as a young kid I got tag along to the air field to see, crawl thru many an aircraft undergoing engine overhauls, chromealloy frame repair, fabric and paintwork.. nearly impossible education opportunity for kids today. As for my brother, he went on to become a Navy carrier pilot ... F8 Crusader..

RE: Clocks

I need someone to put back together a 1934 Ingrahm mantle that the local "repair expert" handed back to me in a paper sack :(

Another childhood memory.. I was given the Ingraham clock below by a neighbor who said it had not run in over the 30 years they had it.. I think I was around 13 years old at the time....and I fixed it.. The mainspring winding ratchet was of a design where the ratchet could get flipped 180 degrees out of position so it was impossible to wind the mainspring. Flipped it into the correct position and ran great. Still runs....



The 1833 date at the top of the label is now almost unreadable.. I think that is the patent date. It was quite clear when I got the clock now close to 60 years ago.

RE: Clocks

"...I was around 13 years old at the time....and I fixed it..."

Think you could do that again? Mine iswas a similar ebony box.

RE: Clocks

swall,

Designing and building a mechanical clock is on my to-do list. This is well into the future at the moment.

--
JHG

RE: Clocks

Sounds like Dan ee was a Dilbert.
B.E.

You are judged not by what you know, but by what you can do.

RE: Clocks

For the last 35 or so years, I've been the custodian of my Grandmother's Aunt's grandfather clock. It isn't anything special - mass produced (German I think) movement in a case that has suffered the onslaught of several generations of boisterous kids - not to mention the tender ministrations of my Grandfather. I have childhood memories of the old soldier in this elderly Church of Scotland minister coming to the fore as he dropped the weight yet again while attempting to wind the going train (there are no click springs).

Despite all that, and my having done very little more than replacing the cords on the weights, blown odd bits of dust off the escapement wheel and wound it once a week (always waiting for it to stop, then winding a whole number of turns - there still being no click springs), it still keeps time to within a minute or two a week and fills the study with a soothing, subdued tick.

A.

RE: Clocks

One could conceivably turn anything into a wall clock, provided you can hang it on the wall.
There are several popular (and profitable for the business minded) ways to make a wall clock with an aviation theme, like the re-purposed altimeter above.
You mount a clock in the center hub of a wooden propeller (takes a lot of wall space!) or a clock inset in the turbine rotor of a time-expired jet engine, for just 2 examples.

If you're a sparky, there seems to be a way to convert old analog meters into clocks, provided you could put in a 12-hour scale on the face, and drive the needle with a count/voltage proportional signal. Reset at noon/midnight and the needle drops back to zero!
Yeah - something like this:

RE: Clocks

How about a classic cat clock?

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931)

RE: Clocks

or perhaps a steam powered clock. . . ?

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931)

RE: Clocks

quote byrdJ: need someone to put back together a 1934 Ingrahm mantle that the local "repair expert" handed back to me in a paper sack :(

Think you could do that again? Mine it was a similar ebony box.

I would be concerned with the possibility of missing parts, if someone has disassembled it.. perhaps someone like at the link below who has the ability to replace or repair parts might be your best bet.. http://www.midcoastclock.com/ingraham-clock-repair...

If your movement is as below, if it would help I would be willing to pull out the movement in mine and take some more detailed photographs



This same neighbor also gave me a small wind up alarm clock that "he tried to fix" and he took the wrong 4 nuts holding the movement together and it flew into a gazillion pieces. I put that one back together. The big challenge was the main and alarm springs.. I had to wind them up fully and then take a needle and thread and "sew" the springs with enough thread to keep them wound tight and then cut the threads out after it was put back together. It was quite a challenge to get all the gears in place, including the springs and bring the main plates together. I would imagine clock makers such as above have some tricks to do this...

RE: Clocks

The 'Steam Clock', Vancouver, correct?

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

RE: Clocks

Correct John, The steam clock is located in GasTown (Vancouver, BC), eh.
GG

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931)

RE: Clocks

Yes, I've been there, the evening before my wife and I boarded a cruise ship heading-up the inland passage to Alaska.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

RE: Clocks

A friend gave me this clock, it's not "classic" or antiquey, but it's very engineer-friendly. All the gears spin (just for show) and the ring gear rotates around. Plenty accurate, and batteries last for years. It's about 2 ft diameter.

RE: Clocks

I have an authentic German black forest Cuckoo clock, and an aviator Altimeter clock mentioned in one of the posts above. I like the mechanical movement of the cuckoo clock.

RE: Clocks

My favorite clock is a cheap old Wesclock dial type with the 120 VAC synchronous motor drive and neon bulb back light. These keep extremely accurate time by basically counting cycles in the power line. I live in a rural area and experience frequent short power outages. This clock tells me exactly how long the power was out by how far behind the time it is. It is easy to set and easy to read, day or night. I went digital for many years and was surprised by how much I missed this type of clock when I acquired one at a neighbor's estate sale.

RE: Clocks

We have a very similar one but without the neon backlight in our kitchen, and I use it to determine power outage duration exactly the same way. Because a couple of the digital clocks in the appliances auto-restart from 12:00 when power is restored, I can also tell from the offset between their readings and the present time just when the outage ended.

CR

"As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another." [Proverbs 27:17, NIV]

RE: Clocks

does NERC (or which every agency) still maintain the average daily frequency to 60.00--> hertzs?

several years back I read an article where they were going to stop because generation for makeup over frequency was not benificail to grid reialibilty (and of course the cost)

RE: Clocks

When I found myself in the jungles of the Moskito coast I found myself called upon to repair a number of old small gensets. I didn't have a lot of test equipment. I did find one of those old synchronous motor clocks and it served for a few years as a reliable frequency meter. (Along with the stop watch function of a digital wrist watch.)
Not the mosquito coast, but the Moskito coast, the home of the Moskito Indians.

Bill
--------------------
"Why not the best?"
Jimmy Carter

RE: Clocks

bydrj,

ERCOT still does time correction.

RE: Clocks

CompositePro quote: My favorite clock is a cheap old Wesclock dial type with the 120 VAC synchronous motor drive and neon bulb back light. These keep extremely accurate time by basically counting cycles in the power line.

A true engineer's clock... especially if you've heard the story of Laurens Hammond.

Having a fondness for Hammond B3 organs (from the '60s rock music) I was blown away when I discovered the story of Laurens Hammond and his development work on the synchronous clock (which I remember from childhood)....to not only become the Hammond Clock Company, but also further work by Laurens led to development of the Hammond organ.. with a mechanical tone generator system using a synchronous motor to drive 91 to 96 tone generators (essentially synchronous motors with the armature driven, and the stator coil the tone output). To start a Hammond organ there is a spring return start switch and a separate run switch. The synchronous drive motor will not start itself as so with the synchronous clocks of the era, so a separate motor (looks like a shaded pole motor) is used to spin the system up and then the synchronous drive motor takes over.

The synchronous motor that can keep accurate time, can make a musical tone that never needed tuning Laurens Hammond

This video does a pretty good job putting the story together https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBjp2ZDA8A0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammond_Clock_Compan...

quote: In 1928, Hammond founded the Hammond Clock Company, after designing a synchronous clock motor that was inspired by Henry Warren's Telechrons, but was not self-starting. These clocks were still popular in Britain in the 1960s, because they would not display a false time. (If a transient power failure occurs, a self-starting clock will afterwards restart and display an incorrect time.) The British generating stations also corrected the number of cycles at the end of the day so that Hammond clocks would be accurate.[clarification needed] Hammond's clock business ran into difficulties in the early 1930s, and he struggled to save it with a number of other inventions, such as an electric bridge table and, slightly later, his famous organ.

In 1933, he bought a used piano, and proceeded to discard everything apart from the keyboard action. Using the keyboard as a controller, he was able to experiment with various sound-generating methods until he found the best one—the tonewheel generator.... Thanks to Hammond's prior manufacturing and engineering experience, the tonewheel generator was extremely well-engineered by the time the organ finally went into production.The number of tonewheel organs still in regular use in the twenty-first century is a testament to the quality of the design and execution of the product.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammond_organ

RE: Clocks

Growing up I knew an man that was a very skilled tinkerer. He had his own forge and did smithy work as a hobby. He was a tool and die man by trade.
He had three clocks, one in the house, one in the shop, and one in an out building. He had salvaged them from an old school. The ones in the shop and building were slaves to the one in the house. The three would always have the same exact time.
I wish that I could find a set of those today.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
P.E. Metallurgy, Plymouth Tube

RE: Clocks

I've always liked these binary clocks for the true geek.

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The Help for this program was created in Windows Help format, which depends on a feature that isn't included in this version of Windows.

RE: Clocks

My father would have loved that Ingram clock. We spent his last 25 years repairing old clocks as a 'hobby'. He would buy them from house auctions, take them apart and rebuild them so they worked better than new. He loved wooden geared clocks and used to hand file new teeth into an old gear to get the right mesh between them. I have a couple that he repaired and gave to me over the years. One is a Cherry banjo clock that I have never been able to get running properly. I have even had 2 clock restorers work on it. Time to get someone else to give it a look.

"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."

Ben Loosli

RE: Clocks

I've got an old Simon Willard banjo clock. They have no chimes so technically it's a timepiece, not a clock, but everybody calls them clocks. My parents had it worked on several times over the years since my grandparents died. It was with one restorer for over 2 years before he gave up. We had a manufacturing engineer who restored clocks and I brought it to him, he was able to get it running perfectly about 4 years ago. Now it's getting a little flaky again. It's not keeping good time, lost about 20 minutes over a week so I adjusted the pendulum a little, made no difference. So I adjusted it some more and then it started gaining 40 minutes a week. Now I'm slowly working it back down. May have to call my guy up again but he's moved about 4 hours away.

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The Help for this program was created in Windows Help format, which depends on a feature that isn't included in this version of Windows.

RE: Clocks

I second the Cuckoo clock. They are folksy and wonderful and contain just enough mechanism to satisfy the inner Rube Goldberg.

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

RE: Clocks

As a mechanical engineer, I like the idea of the Atmos clock... Purely mechanical, powered by changes in temperature and atmospheric pressure.

-handleman, CSWP (The new, easy test)

RE: Clocks

dgallup; That's looking like bad lube/friction/wear issues. I've seen many Cuckoo clocks reach that point and that was it, as they would never 'regulate' anymore. Part of my childhood was in Germany and the Germans are fairly Cuckoo clocky so my dad was always bring another one home. We essentially burned thru them all with all of them eventually going out of regulation.

Keith Cress
kcress - http://www.flaminsystems.com

RE: Clocks

The Simon Willard banjo clocks are pretty valuable antiques so it's worth keeping it going. The guy who fixed it the last time is highly capable, he can reproduce new gears, etc. pretty much anything any clock could need. It's really hard to find people like that.

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The Help for this program was created in Windows Help format, which depends on a feature that isn't included in this version of Windows.

RE: Clocks

Really digging that gear clock, Ross... wouldn't mind finding a pattern so I could cut out a replica on the laser/CNC.

Dan - Owner
http://www.Hi-TecDesigns.com

RE: Clocks

Schatz makes a nice clock. I got a ship bell clock that's fun, but noisy overnight!

(I also have one of those crazy binary clocks in my office - endlessly curious to those that don't understand it!)

f-d

ípapß gordo ainÆt no madre flaca!

RE: Clocks

So how quickly can you tell the time glancing at the binary clock?

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The Help for this program was created in Windows Help format, which depends on a feature that isn't included in this version of Windows.

RE: Clocks

Last year I got a new wheelset for my bike. The old set is sitting in my shop. I could use a shop clock. What do you think, would this be too hokey?



Too bad they are 32-spoke wheels. 24 or 36 spoke wheels would make it easy to space out the hour numbers.

RE: Clocks

Great idea! Make one for me, too, please!

STF

RE: Clocks

the binary clock is not practical (or I haven't trained my eye). It's just a fun curiosity!

f-d

ípapß gordo ainÆt no madre flaca!

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