Sunday, November 02, 2014

Fixing my clock

 
This rather childish clock has hung on my wall for at least 15 years. Recently, it stopped working. At first I assumed a dead battery but replacing this saw the metal terminals in the battery box break off.
 
A sensible person would have taken this as a reason to replace the clock for something more grown-up. I am not a sensible person and nor can I be called properly grown-up, so I decided to fix it.

 
The plan was to replace the old mechanism with a new one bought from Maplin. Work started by carefully levering off the hands and then undoing the centre nut with some thin pliers.


 
Once I had old (left) and new (right) mechanisms, it became obvious that there was to be no quick-fix. The old shaft was larger than the new so I'd have to fill the hole in the face a bit. Also, the hands wouldn't fit on the new shaft and I didn't want to change them.

 
 
Plan B. Since the mechanics work OK, just replace the battery box with a new one epoxied to the back of the face. The wires are soldered to terminal visible on the edge of the circuit board. Happily, this works and I can hope for another few years timekeeping.



1 comment:

Roger said...

My other half has a rather nice artisan clock not in a cat motif.

But I had an unfortunate habit knocking it off the wall - which the mechanism finally took issue with.

I bought some new mechanisms and found pretty much the same issues as you did .

I measured the shaft diameters etc, and spent an awful long time on google to find a movement with the same measurements.

So it can be done, but whether it's worth the effort in your case is moot.