Prestige Clock Repair

I was cleaning up my email inbox and ran across this link. It's an article on the Collectors Weekly site that was based on an interview I gave about 15 years ago. The writer did a very good job of transcribing our conversation, and I must say I spouted some pretty good information. I think I may have posted this link a long time ago, but I have a lot of new friends now, so I'll go ahead and post it again. If the subject of antique clocks sounds interesting, I hope you'll give it a look!

The Care and Repair of 19th-Century American Clocks Dave Weisbart talks about 19th-century clocks, discussing notable manufacturers and designs and sharing his experience with clock repairs. Dave is the ow...

Cool gothic-style clock from the movie The Stranger starring Edward G Robinson, Loretta Young and Orson Wells. It looks like it has moving figures.

I ran across a very strange issue with a striking clock. A gear that was supposed to stop in a particular rotational position after every striking sequence was instead stopping at different positions each time the clock struck the hour. This was causing a problem with the way it interacted with other parts of the movement. I figured out three things: (1) that wheel was supposed to have an 8-leaf pinion, but it had a 7-leaf pinion, so the gear was stopping in increments of 1/7 of a rotation. (2) I figured out and implemented a relatively simple workaround that didn't involve disassembling the movement. (3) Just for ducks, I put the strike sequence (1,1,2,1,3,1,4,1, etc.) into an Excel spreadsheet and found that the most problematic position for the gear occurred 13 times over a two-day period. Having already "fixed" the issue, this was kind of meaningless, but it was a fun exercise to provide nested "IF" statements to Excel to get the desired results. (Yeah, I'm a nerd.)