Each clock repairer seems to have their own favorite method for cleaning their clocks. Some prefer mineral spirits; some like ammoniated cleaners; some like dish detergent. Because I’m just starting out, my particular cleaning process is evolving. This post covers my current process and recipes.
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I (Stupidly) Bend the Vise Faces Parallel
DON’T DO WHAT I DID! I didn’t realize the dangers until I was done.
A vise’s jaw faces are supposed to be parallel, that is: perfectly flat when they meet. As you can see, this vise’s jaws weren’t.
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Trying to Remove Rusted Screws from the Vise
Score so far: Vise: 1, Me: 0. In this post I tell the sad tale of trying to extract the jaw face screws that are frozen with rust – nothing has worked for me.
Warning: Once again, I don’t know what I’m doing!
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Removing Rust and Paint from the Vise
I wasn’t happy with how much rust remained after the vinegar treatment, so I decided to give the vise a treatment with Evapo-Rust – my favorite rust remover.
I also decided that so little paint was left, I’d strip the remaining paint off, either with paint stripper or a wire wheel, depending on whether the paint had lead in it.
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Restoring a Rusty Vise – it Begins
WARNING: I don’t know what I’m doing!
On a whim I bought a rusty, Ace brand 3 1/2″ (say 90 mm) vise at a garage sale. I’ve watched a few vise restoration videos, so I think I have a chance at restoring it…
How it started: I’ve been watching a lot of Matthew Read’s excellent clock repair videos (Open Clock Club Archive, How to repair pendulum clocks, and How to Repair Pendulum Clocks – LIVESTREAM). Lately he’s been repairing an early 19th century clock, doing a lot of metalworking in the process. Inspired by that work – and needing a vise for my clockmaker’s bench – I decided to buy a rusty vise and attempt to restore it. This post covers the first step in that restoration.
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Spoken Songs: Poetry Read Aloud
Poetry is meant to be read aloud.
This is my little poetry corner, containing dead folks’ poetry (for copyright reasons), in English (because it’s my native language), starting with William Shakespeare.
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Adjusting the Count Lever on an Ansonia Clock Movement
While waiting for its case to be repaired, my craft-altered Ansonia Derby clock has been running on a test stand – off and on for quite a while. I noticed that every great once in a while the count lever failed to drop into the 8 o’clock slot, causing the number of hours struck to be incorrect from then on.
The problem was that the count lever needed adjusting so the lever wouldn’t hang up on the walls of the slot it was dropping into. In this post I describe my adventure of adjusting (bending) the count lever.
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Needhamia Emmigrates to a new Needhamia.com
Due to an attack on the old, out-of-date Needhamia.com web site, I’ve rebuilt the site on a modern host, rebuilding from LibreOffice files of the old posts to avoid transferring any infection from the old site.
The longer story
I created the old needhamia.com in 2014. The web provider has considered that site “legacy” for several years. Unfortunately, that status meant the site became vulnerable to attack due to obsolete versions of software: 3 times in the past few years the old needhamia.com was compromised, usually by modifications to its .htaccess file, among other things. I finally got fed up with the attacks and decided to create a new, modern site. To avoid reinfection, I’m not doing a simple backup of the old site and restore to the new one.
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The High Cost of Owning a Clock
…or why you should learn to maintain your own clock.
So you’re looking at that clock in the antique mall window. Perhaps it’s a lovely old Sessions Black Mantel clock, with lion heads and metal arches. It runs, and it’s only $90, so you take it home.
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Clock Repair: My Meager Knowledge of The Hardness of Metals
It’s taken me a while to learn some basic metallurgy I need for clock repair. When I started I scratched up my brass clock plates by cleaning with SOS pads – steel wool – because I didn’t know that steel is harder than brass. In this post I collect what I’ve picked up in this metals game of Scissors, Paper, Rock.
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