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.
Continue reading I (Stupidly) Bend the Vise Faces ParallelScore 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!
Continue reading Trying to Remove Rusted Screws from the ViseI 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.
Continue reading Removing Rust and Paint from the ViseWARNING: 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.
Continue reading Restoring a Rusty Vise – it BeginsIn converting a desk into a clockmaker’s bench, I wound up buying a router and router table to make the drawers. The router table has been taking up space on my workbench ever since.
I decided to make a rolling cabinet to mount the router table to, using scrap plywood and some drawers left over from a bathroom remodel.
The project is a good example of a thrown-together wood project, and a few lessons in “measure twice; cut once”.
In August I bought an old, 7-drawer student’s desk at a garage sale. Since then I’ve been converting it to a clockmaker’s bench. This note is a quick update; I plan to write a full, sort-of-how-to set of posts once I’ve completed it.
Continue reading Progress on My Clockmaker’s BenchSince I attended my first local chapter meeting of the NAWCC (National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors) I thought I’d make a quick gallery of the clocks I’ve worked on so far.
Continue reading My Clock Repairs So FarThe family cuckoo clock I’m working on is being capricious about when it decides to play the music, so I’ve built a test stand that will let me see what’s going wrong.
After looking through the wide variety of weight-driven clock test stands on NAWCC.org. I decided to build a floor-standing U-frame.
Continue reading Building a Cuckoo Clock Test StandOnce I had the eBay cuckoo clock cleaned, adjusted, repaired, and running, I put the hands on. To my surprise, the minute hand kept slipping, no matter how I tightened the hand nut that’s supposed to hold it in place. The solution to this mystery lay in a troubleshooting video from a cuckoo clock seller in the Black Forest.
Continue reading Problems Adjusting the Cuckoo Minute HandA while ago I bought a beat up cuckoo clock on eBay, to practice cuckoo clock cleaning and repair. Its face was missing most of its numerals. In this post, I describe how to use a 3D printed template to glue the numerals on a cuckoo clock’s face.
Continue reading Replacing the Numbers on a Cuckoo Clock Dial
