Antique Clocks - Their Care and Servicing

1. Class Introduction: Hi, and welcome to this introduction to How to Care for your antique clocks. And in this course, we're going to be working with a time only movement. And what I have here on the table. Is an Ingraham. And so this is the movement we're going to be using throughout this course, and we're going to be showing how to disassemble this safely, clean it, and then put it back together. And you can see it's quite dirty. So we're going to want to address all of this. And to disassemble a clock safely, we're going to need a few tools. And they're nothing real special, but we do need to have what we need. So let's take a quick look at some of the tools that we're going to be working with. So, first off, you're going to want to have some kind of a nut driver for removing the nuts that hold the two plates of the clock together of the movement together. So we'll use this. You could use crescent wrench or a small pair of pliers, but those are going to more likely scratch the plates. So this is going to be a better way to go with that. This is called a let down key, and this is what we're going to be using on the winding arbor to both wind and release the tension or unwind the mainspring. You do not want to use your usual winding key. As you're trying to especially take the pressure off and unwind a mainspring which has a lot of power to it. If I was to use my regular winding key and I start letting the pressure off, the power down. If this was to slip and get away from me, these wings could swing around and easily cut me or even break my finger or thumb. So this is not what you want to use. So a let down key, and these run around $25. And you get a series of different sized ratchets for different sized winding arbors, and that just pops out and then pops back in. You're also going to want small pair of needle nose pliers to be able to get inside the movement where you can't get your hands, to be able to do some adjustments and even a pair of tweezers for fine tuning and fine adjustments where the pliers might add a little too much pressure to it. Finally, this clock is powered by a main spring. So this would be the winding arbor right here. So this spring has a lot of power in it. If I was to take the plates apart right now, this spring would just explode. It could break gears within the movement itself. It could break my fingers. I could cut me. So what we're going to want are a series of sea clams. And these come as a set of four for different sized main springs. And what it is is we tighten the mainspring. We put a C clamp around that and then let the power back out, and this holds that in place to where we can remove this main spring out of this movement safely and work with it. So that's it. That's what we're going to be doing throughout this course, and I'm really excited to share this with you and walk hers through it. And your project in this course, well, get yourself an old movement. I would suggest you get something that is, I'm going to say, expendable, because you don't want to work with something that's a valuable family heirloom, something like that right now. You know, these can be complicated, and you want to kind of wrap your head around it before you work on something that you're going to regret if you can't put it back together or something goes wrong. So I got this in a clock for about $10 on Facebook Marketplace. You can find them at yard sales, whatever, and just have something that you don't have an emotional attachment to to get started with. So that said, let's go ahead and jump into how a clock actually works and that come of the different parts of it, and then we'll move on from there. So thanks for watching. I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson. 2. How a Clock Works: Hi, and welcome to this lesson. And in this one, we're going to talk about how does a clock work? How does it keep time? How does it actually operate? Now, a clock is a machine. It's a mechanical object, and all machines need some kind of a power source, some kind of energy to keep them going. For antique clocks, we're looking at either mainspring or weights as in a grandfather clock. So what we're going to do is we have five components that need to be incorporated into a clock movement for it to operate effectively. Those components are, again, a power source. We have to have some kind of gears or wheels to move that power source through the clock. We have to have a way of regulating this power, and that is called the escapement. That's where you'll hear the tick and the talk in the clock. And we'll take a look at that here in a few moments. You have to have a way of controlling how fast that escapement is moving to where it keeps time accurately. So the clock isn't running too fast or too slow. And then finally, some kind of indicator, and for us, that would be the hands on the clock, the minute hand and the hour hand. So let's take a quick look at this movement I have here on the table, and we'll walk our way through these five different components, and then we're going to take a look at a clock I've got up here on the wall, a regulator, and we'll kind of wrap this lesson up with a view of it. So let's take a quick look at the table. So here's our movement. And again, this movement has to have a power source. And in this instance, that power source is going to be our mainspring at the back. This is the winding arbor of the mainspring right there. So we've got the mainspring. That's our power source. Now, we have to have a way of moving this power through the mechanism of the clock, and that is through these gears or in clock speak, we call them wheels, and they're going to move this through from what is called the great wheel, which is the one with the mainspring through the second wheel, and they're just named in order. So we've got the second wheel then we've got a third wheel right here. We've got a fourth wheel here, and then finally the escapement or the escape wheel, the escapement wheel. Now, in clocks, we're referring to this as a train. So this is a time only mechanism, a time only movement. So this is the timing train, but it's also the going train because from the power source all the way through to the escapement, then this is the train that keeps the whole clock going. So they just call it the going train. So now that brings us to the escapement. And if I set this down, if my pendulum is ticking back and forth, it's moving the escapement one tooth at a time. And this is what controls how fast or slow the clock is actually running. So if I move this really fast, then the clock is probably going to run fast. If I have it going too slow, the clock is going to run So the controller on this turns out to be the pendulum. And the pendulum, if it is higher on the pendulum rod, which is what this is called, it's going to tick faster, and if it's lower on the rod, it's going to tick slower. So that controls how fast this clock is running and how accurately it's keeping time. And finally, the motion works. This is the arbor that our hands minute hand and our hand would fit onto. This is what controls the hands moving around the face of the clock. So let's go and take a quick look at the face of a clock and our controller or pendulum in action and talk a little bit about that and something that we refer to as the motion works, which it's hard to see with this, but the motion works are interconnected, and they are what control the hour and minute hand in this clock. So let's take a quick look at the regulator I have up on the wall. Okay, so here we have a regulator running up here on my office wall, and you can see the pendulum is regulating the time. So it's telling me how accurately the hands of this clock are working their way through. And you should be able to hear the tick and the talk, and that's that escapement wheel working up inside. And that's the heart of our clock. Now we have the hands of our clock right up here, and that motion works that I was just mentioning over at the table are what control the hands of the clock. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to open this, and those motion works are geared in such a way and I'm going to stop this for a moment. Those motion works are geared in such a way that they're 60 minutes in an hour. So as this minute hand works its way, and I've got another clock chiming in the background, all the way around 60 minutes, it is geared in such a way that the hour hand only moves 5 minutes, so that's a little bit off. But it only moves 5 minutes, so it's moving one 12th of the amount of time that this minute hand is working its way around the clock. And we're going to be talking about that to a greater degree later. So that's it. That's how a clock keeps time. You've got a power source, you've got the gears or wheels that work through the wheel train, through the timing train, or if it was a time and strike like one we were just looking at, it would have two trains, a timing train, and a strike train. We've got the escapement, which controls how all the other gears run to keep time accurately. That is controlled by the pendulum, and the pendulum swinging back and forth is going to indicate whether the clock is running fast, slow, or right on time. And then finally, the hands, the indicators that do tell us what the time is, and they are geared ratioed to where one full revolution, 60 minutes of the minute hand, the hour hand moves one 12th of that or 5 minutes to indicate what the hour is. So that's what a clock is. That's how it operates. And I know that seems kind of simplistic, but it's the basics of how it actually works. So from here on, we're going to start looking at disassembly of the mechanism of the movement that I have here, how to work with that and make sure that you know where everything goes back into place. And then cleaning this, putting it back together, and keeping our fingers crossed that this old movement is actually going to do what we need it to do. Okay, thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next lesson. 3. Disassembly Part One: Hi, welcome back. And in this lesson, we're going to start the actual disassembly of our movement. So let's take a look at the table, and I'll show you where I've got this setup, and then we're going to talk about how to disassemble this safely, and we're going to do this over a couple of lessons. So let's take a quick look at the table. Now, in this instance, I've gone ahead and put the hands back on the clock just to show how the hands can be removed from the face of the clock. And the hands are attached to the center arbor right here. So we've got the hands on the center arbor, and the hands are going to be held in place by either a tapered pin or a small nut. So in this case, it's a small nut, and I'm going to unscrew that and the minute hand just comes right off. And I always keep a small tray where I can keep all of the different parts in so I don't have them scattered across the work table. Now, the hour hand just compresses on, and sometimes it'll come off real easy and sometimes you got to work at it, but that one popped off pretty well. So now I can take this and set it aside. It fits in this tray, so I'm going to put it back in that, and I keep that closed up. So I don't lose anything. So right now, we've got our escapement assembly right up in here. This is the escape wheel or the escapement wheel. And then we've got the anchor assembly, which is made up of the anchor, which is this portion right here, and I'm going to zoom in on this for us. So we have the anchor assembly, and the anchor is right here. That's what is more or less like a switch for controlling how fast the wheels turn and controlling our time. The anchor assembly, again, the anchor. These are the pallets. The pallets are what come in contact with the teeth of the escape wheel itself. Then we have the crutch coming down. The crutch is what will be connected to the pendulum to help regulate how fast this is ticking. And the anchor assembly is held in place by the pallet **** right here. And the escape wheel is held in place by the escape **** right here. That's what these are called. And I'm just going to demonstrate what happens if this escape wheel doesn't have this retaining, this anchor assembly to regulate its speed. So I'm going to lift the anchor retaining clip out of the way. And it just swings over. And then the anchor assembly just slides up and off. Now, without that anchor assembly, there's nothing to control this, and you can see how the gears, the wheels are all turning. So I'm going to stop that for right now. I'm going to put the anchor assembly I'll put the clip back in place to hold it. So before we take this assembly apart, we need to capture this mainspring. Well, you have to keep this confined, if I don't, if I take this apart, this mainspring is just going to fly apart. So we need to capture that, and we're going to do that using our C clamp. So if I bring this around, I can take my C clamp. I can fit it in here. And now I can hold this in place. And there's two ways that I can release the tension on this. I could remove the escape, the anchor assembly, and just let it slowly, you know, take the tension off and bring it onto this, or I can go ahead and actually go down inside, and it's going to be hard to see, but there is something called the click down in here, and that is going to be what keeps this wheel from turning, and that's where the let down key comes in. So if I'm going to be working with this, then I want to have my let down key in place, and I'm going to release some tension, and I want to get that clip out of the way. Now, I can control this unwinding, and I want to kind of keep my thumb in here. And this is where using a let down key rather than the winding key is much more controlled. And I can run this out and I'm letting tension off of the mainspring. And as it does, it expands into the s clamp. And now you can see that s clamp is wrapped around my mainspring, and it's containing all of this power that's in there. And then at that point, I can just pop the click back in to make sure it doesn't move if I don't want it to. And now I can safely take all of this apart. I can pull my clip anchor clip spring out of the way or retaining clip spring out of the way. I can release, like, escapement and that will just kind of continue working its way down, and now I can safely take the front plate off. So I'm just going to go ahead and let this do what it's doing. And in the meantime, we'll take a break and we'll be back for the next lesson, and that one, we'll actually take this apart and talk about how to know exactly what it is that the order that you're going to be putting this back together in. Okay. So that's the beginning of it. Capturing that mainspring so that it has its tension controlled and it can't explode on you. And then going ahead and letting some of the tension out, and then we can take this apart. Okay. I'll see you in a bit. 4. Disassembly Part Two: Okay, we're going to carry on with our disassembly of our movement, and all of the energy has now been released and contained by our C clamp. So the mainspring has expanded out as far as it can run down, if you would, and it is contained so we can control that and work with it safely. And we can now separate the plates that are holding all of our wheels, all of our gears in place within the clock. So let's go ahead and make one more step and continue on with this disassembly. So you can see the escape wheel has pretty much run down. I tap it, and it's going to move a little bit. But for the most part, it is out of energy. So now we can safely take the top plates and the bottom plate. We can separate these plates now. And to do that, I'm going to use this little nut driver. And again, our mainspring is totally contained with our C clamp, so it can't explode. I can't do any damage. So I can come in, and again, I could use a pair of pliers or a little crescent wrench, but this is going to be safer as far as the potential of scratching the plate, which we don't want to do. So I can take that take these. Now I'll get my container, you know, put everything inside. So now I've got all of that safe. I don't have to worry about it being lost. And I can turn and I'm going to very gently. Now the escape wheel wants to fall out. That's okay. It can just sit off to the side here for a second while I finish bringing my plate up. I can set that off to the side. And then I'm going to go ahead and put my escape wheel back in place. So that's what our works look like. There's a front plate, back plate. This is what our works looks like with that plate out of the way. So at this point, you want to make sure you know how all of this goes back together. Again, this is the great wheel or the first wheel right here. And then the second wheel and the teeth of the second wheel engaged opinions of the third. The teeth of the third wheel engaged opinions on the fourth wheel, and then the teeth on the fourth wheel engaged opinion on the escapement. So just real quick, let's take a look at this. We have our wheel. This is the escape wheel. We have our arbor, this is called a pinion. This is what the teeth of the adjacent wheel connect with. This is a lantern arbor. It's got little steel pins between these two plates. So the arbor and then this is the pivot. And the pivot goes into a bushing on the plate. So it would fit into the buhing on the plate at its appropriate location. Well, we want to make sure we know where those appropriate locations are. So I'm going to bring this back over. I'm going to take my escape wheel, fit it back in. And then what I've done is I've taken this and I've actually drawn myself a diagram. So I'm showing my great wheel right here. The second wheel comes over the top. So as I look at this, my second wheel is over the top of the great wheel. The teeth of the great wheel are engaging the pinions on the second wheel. The third wheel is underneath the second wheel, the fourth wheel is underneath the third wheel, and then the teeth of the fourth wheel engaged the pinion on my escape wheel here, and then my motion works on the center arbor are right here, which I have drawn off to one side. So I have that pancake effect, and I know how that works together. I've also made sure that I make note of where the mainspring comes down and anchors onto this post right here so that I'm sure that I'm putting this in properly when I come to put this back together. So I can come in. I can take the escape wheel off. I can take the second wheel. Well, I'll take the fourth wheel out, the third wheel out, the second wheel, out. Then my motion works. I will take them out. I'm going to set them off to the side because they're more or less their own little unit. And now I can come in and I can lift the great wheel and the mainspring out. And it just slips up off of this post. And it's held by the C clamp, so this cannot explode on me and cause physical damage to either myself or the rest of the clock. And then here's our back plate. So in the next lesson, we're going to come in and we're going to actually we have to be able to take this mainspring, take this, open it up to where we can get in and clean it and lubricate it. So we're going to look at a mainspring winder and then how to take that apart safely. And then at that point, we've got the mainspring totally opened up, and we can start looking at what we have to do to actually do the cleaning before we reassemble all of these parts. So make sure you take photographs of the order of all the gears go together, how the wheel train works together. I like drawing diagram personally because if I draw the diagram, I find I have to pay a little more attention to the order of how everything fits together. If I just take a photograph, yes, I've got those, but doing an actual diagram, I think, makes a huge difference because you really have to pay attention to the order and how everything meshes together in the assembly. So now we've got our components pretty well taken apart, disassembled. Now in the next one, we'll go ahead to the mainspring winders, and we're going to let the tension off of it, and then we'll be able to clean the mainspring, lubricate it, and then clean all of the rest of these parts, and we'll go over all of this in lessons in just short lessons so we keep this concise and moving along smoothly. Okay, that's it. So we've got it disassembled, and I will see you in the next lesson. 5. Releasing the Mainspring: Alright. In this lesson, we have disassembled the gears out of our clock movement, and we have removed the main spring. We captured it with that se clamp. But that main spring is really dirty, and we need to release the power on that spring so we can unwind the whole thing, get it off of the arbor, and then give it a good cleaning, and then lubricating it, and then put it back into the assembly once we put all of these parts back together. But in the last lesson when I was doing the let down on the main spring after I had wound it up, put the C clamp on, and then I was letting the power out where that spring would expand to where the C clamp would hold it tight. My hand was in the way, pretty much the entire time. So what I want to do is have a quick recap on the click and the click spring that works with the ratchet wheel so that when you're winding a clock, it doesn't unwind, and when I was lessening the power out, what I did to achieve so let's have a quick look at how this all operates. So here's our main spring out of the clock. And here's the ratchet wheel. And this right here is the click. And when you're winding your clock, you have your winding key on this arbor right here. Then as you're winding this, the click falls in each of these little ratchets and keeps it from unwinding. Well, when I needed to let the power out to where it would come into and hold with this C clamp, I had to get this out of the way. So we have our ratchet wheel, we have our click, and then this is the click spring. The click spring just keeps the click in place so it doesn't pop out by mistake. So when I was letting the power out, I needed to have this completely out of the way. So all I do with that is I just pushed it up out of the way. Now, in some clocks, this click spring will sit completely out of the way. You can move it. This one, you just push the click out and it holds. And then when I put it back, the click spring holds it in place. And now when I wind the clock, again, the click falls into the notches on this ratchet wheel, and that's what keeps it from unwinding. But this Main spring is really dirty. So what we're going to want to do is take it off of this arbor completely, get it out of the sea clamp, and give it a good thorough cleaning, which we'll be doing later on. So how do we get this out of the arbor? How do we get it off of this main spring off of the sea clam? Well, we're going to use a device called a main spring winder. Now, you can buy these commercially, and probably the most preferred main spring winder is the Ollie Baker, and it is an excellent tool, and it will run you. This is November of 2025, and an Ollie Baker is going to run you about $450. So I didn't want to spend $450. So I built this. This is three quarter inch poplar, and it's about 14 " in length. And I just put this together to where I had my own spring winder that I can work with. So when I want to work with this, I have a piece of aluminum that has a small little divot in the tip of it that I drilled to hold the arbor on one side, my winding. I've got a threaded knob here on the top to be able to lock this into place. And then I've got a seven 16th ratchet at this side, which just so happens, here's my let down key. My chuck comes out. It pops in, I can take my arbor winding key fit that together and now tighten this down. I don't want any of this to move. I want this to be nice and solid. I don't want it popping apart. But now I've got to have a way to corral this particular end of my spring so I can unwind and wind it. And in this instance, I'm using a piece of quarter inch steel rod, and I just put it all the way through. I put it through this block over here, so it just slides in. And now this is corral. At this point, you're going to want to have a good leather glove, some kind of hand protection because I want to wind this to the point where I can release the s clamp off of this and then eventually take the arbor off. So I have a ratchet at this end, and what I have to do is tighten the spring. Well, which way do I go? Well, the spring comes around and winds in this direction. So I'm going to turn my ratchet in the same direction that the spring is facing, and that's going to tighten it down enough to where I can release the s clamp. So again, making sure this is secure, everything is ready to go. I can put my hand over this, and I can start tightening this enough to where just about there. And now I can remove the see clamp, set it aside, and now I can let this unwind. And I'm going to keep my hand over this so that as it unwinds, the spring doesn't bulge out. And I'm going to kind of show what this is looking like a little bit more than I normally would I like to keep this under control. And now, and when this spring drops over to that side, I know I have pretty well gotten all of the tension out of it. I can go ahead, pull my release back undo, slip the aluminum out. And then pull my spring out. Now my spring is completely unwound, but I'm gonna want to get it off of this arbor. And there's a little notch down on the inside that holds this arbor into this spring. What I want to do is I want to be able to get this off of this so I can give it a thorough cleaning. And that's what we're going to do. In the next lesson, we'll go ahead and finish taking this spring off of the arbor so that we can give it a thorough cleaning and inspection. And then we're also going to go ahead and walk our way through the actual cleaning solution and process of getting all of these different parts, the plates, the gears, all of the portions of our clock move it nice and clean, and so we can inspect it, make sure everything is good to go, to be able to reassemble it and get this thing working. Okay, so that's it for this lesson right here, and I will see you in the next one, and we'll go ahead and pull this spring off of the arbor. 6. Removing the Mainspring from the Arbor: Hi, and welcome to this lesson. And in the last lesson, we released all the energy out of that mainspring using the spring winder. And now in this one, we're going to go ahead and remove the spring from the winding arbor. The reason we want to do this is we want to get this spring nice and clean all the way down, and you're not going to be able to do that while it's still on the arbor. The other side of that is we want to make sure that we can dry thoroughly all the way down within these coils. If we have it still tied up, even this tight, it's going to get moisture down in these inner coils, and it's going to be a lot harder to dry that. And if we don't dry it, we're going to get rust. So we want to pull this off of the winding arbor so we can give it a good cleaning. So let's go ahead and take a look at the table and how we accomplish this. So here's our mainspring. And remember, we took it off using the spring winder. And it was in this orientation. So I want to make sure when I put this back together that I'm going to have it going in the same direction or the click and the click spring, click and click spring aren't going to be effective. So I want to make sure I've got it in this orientation, and I put it back in the same way when we reassemble. Now, the spring is held onto the arbor by a little pin that's on the arbor itself. We'll see that once I release this. And then the spring has a small hole in it that hooks over that, that anchors it to the winding arbor. And then when we wind this up, that's what holds it and lets it get its tension. So different ways. Everybody's got a different way of doing this for the most part, what I'm going to do is I like to use a small screwdriver, and I'll just kind of work my way in to the spring here, and sometimes it goes pretty easy. Sometimes it puts up a little bit of a fight. But let's see what happens with this one here. So if I put my spring down in and work it around, There we go. Okay, so I've gotten it off, took a little bit. But here's that little pin right there. That's with There's a little hole in the spring down in here that hooks onto this winding arbor. Now we're going to be able to give this spring a thorough cleaning all the way around, lubricate it, and then put it back, making sure of our orientation to put it back together and reassemble. So in the next lessons, we're going to go ahead, clean the mainspring, and we're going to be setting up to do the actual gears and gear works that we're going to do with our assembly, get all this nice and clean, and then we can reassemble our movement. Okay, that was it for this very short lesson, and I'll see you in a bit. Mm hm. 7. Cleaning the Mainspring: Alright, here we are, and we're going to go ahead and give our cleaning to the main spring. And what I'm going to do with this is I've got some older cleaning solution that I'm going to give this a pre clean with so that I can get some of the old grease and just some of not rust, but just dirt out of this. So I can give it the best cleaning I can, and then I'll put it into a fresh batch of solution in the ultrasonic cleaner. So let's go ahead and I'm going to start by putting on my rubber gloves to protect my hands. And get these on. And then, of course, my safety goggles because I do not want any of this splashing into my eyes. So I'm gonna put these on. And now we're going to go ahead and we'll get this. And now I can just start giving this a scrub and get some of this initial dirt and like I say, old lubricant washed off of this as best I can. And I'm just going to keep working this around, and I'll go as deep into these coils as I can with the kitchen sponge. And then at that point, I'll shift over to the old toothbrush and give it down deeper into these coils, just about there. So I'm just going to set that right there and just work my way down as deep as I can into these coils. And that's about as far as I'm going to be able to go with this. So at this point, what I want to do is I'm going to go ahead and put this into the ultrasonic cleaner, and we'll get that going and about 20 minutes or so and give it a really good cleaning down inside these coils. So let's go ahead and get that started. Okay, let's go ahead and I'm going to put the main spring into this little basket right here. And now I can just take this and I'm going to set it down inside my cleaner, put the lid on Okay, we're just gonna let that run now for about 20 minutes and give that a really good cleaning. Then we'll pull it out and see how it looks. All right. I'll see you in about 20 minutes. Okay, we're back, and it's been 20 minutes, and we're ready to take this up and out. We'll take it out, set it on these paper towels for a moment. The lid back on that. So here's our spring. And I'm going to go ahead and just now that it's been through the cleaner, I'm just going to give it a quick rub down. Just to kind of get a little more of the grime off, but it's And then at that point, we're going to go ahead and I want to get as much of this off as I can of the solution. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm just going to dip it and give it a rinse in my distilled water. Then I want to make sure I get as much water out of this as I can. I've got my air compressor. That's. Using the compressed air, I can get down pretty darn deep into these coils, and that's what I want to do. If I have any water left in there, I'm going to get rest, and I don't want that. So the next step is I've got some 91% alcohol, and I'm going to go ahead and dip this into that because that alcohol is going to be able to displace any water that's down in there I may not have gotten with the air compressor. So I'm just going to drop this down in just for a few moments. Give it a little bit of a jiggle around. Then I can bring it up and out. And then once again, I'm going to give it the air compressor. M Now, with that, we'll take it. I'm gonna take it in. I'm going to put it in the oven in the house. I'm gonna let it have 180 degrees for about 30 minutes, maybe a hair longer. I want to make sure that I bake all this water out of this coil, out of this main spring that I possibly can. So we'll go ahead and do that. And then we're gonna be moving on to the next step with the wheels. Alright, I'll see you in a bit. Oh 8. Cleaning the Wheels: Well, now that we have cleaned the main spring and dried it thoroughly, and again, I use that air compressor to really blow that loose water out between the coils of the spring before I put it into the oven to let it dry and really bake all that water out to prevent any rust. So now we're going to go ahead and do the same thing again. We're going to clean our going train. So all of the wheels, the great wheel that goes with the main spring, our motion works, all of the different parts that need to go in, get these as clean as we can. I'm using my ultrasonic cleaner, but if you don't have one, that's okay. Just get a plastic tub, and you can put the same solution into a plastic tub at the proper dilution, and then just let it soak a little bit longer, and it'll be fine. So anyway, let's just take a quick look at the table. So I'm going to be using this somewhat glorified giant tea strainer, and I do that because it just helps me to keep everything contained and eliminates the chance of anything falling through this basket. So I'm just going to put my smaller gears inside this little strainer, and I can bring the motion works over and put them in, as well. There's enough room to be able to get all of this inside. And then I can just close this up, close that and set it in the basket. Now I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to use this smaller strainer to put the four nuts that hold the plates together that go onto the posts. And that will be ready to go. I can set the pendulum down inside. I can set the anchor assembly, a pendulum rod with the suspension spring, the great wheel, and those nets. So now this is ready to go into the ultrasonic cleaner, and that's where we're going to go in just a few moments. So I'll see you over at the bench. 9. Into the Cleaning Solution: Alright, we're over at the ultronic cleaner, and I've got our wheels that need to go in for about 20 minutes. So I'm just going to go ahead and take and set these down into the solution. And at that point, we'll give them about 20 minutes, and we'll just let this run and give these guys good cleaning, and then we'll bring them out, rinse them, give them a quick rinse with a 91% alcohol, and then they'll go into the oven in the house, as well, again, 180 degrees for about 30 minutes and give them a good drawing and make sure we get all the water out of these wheels. Okay, I'll see you in about 20 minutes. Okay, it's been 20 minutes, and our wheels have gone through their cycle. So I'm just going to go ahead and, again, take that out and let it sit there to drain. Go ahead. Turn this off. And at that point, I've got all of our wheels here. So again, I'm going to give them a rinse in distilled water, and then I'm going to give them a little bath with some alcohol to get any residual water off, and we'll set them aside and get them into the oven here as soon as we can. So I'm just going to take our wheels out. And I'm just gonna drop them down into the distilled water to give them a quick rinse. I've got some paper towels sitting down here, so I'm just setting them on the paper towel for a moment. So it does take a little bit of time. But you want to make sure you're getting all this water off of this. Then after these are dry, what we're going to be able to do is come in in next lesson. And we're going to start talking about polishing and burnishing our rivets or not our rivets, our pivots, sorry. And then we'll be looking at the front and back plates, and we'll go ahead and clean and burnish the pivot holes in the plates, 'cause we want these to be able to spin as freely as possible with as little friction as possible. So that's what we're gonna do. So, um, let's see. We've still got a couple of things in here. We've got our anchor part of our escapement. At this point, we're ready to take the wheels and all of the motion works, the pendulum bob, all of this in. We're going to pop it in the oven, give it a 30 minute bake at 180 degrees Fahrenheit, and that'll dry all this water out. Then we can start taking a look at the pivots and what they need to be if they need to be polished and then burnished. And then also, again, the plates of the front and back plate on the clock movement itself, and we're going to be burnishing those. So that's it for getting our wheels and main spring clean. Now let's go on to the next step. I'll see you in the next lesson. Oh 10. Pegging the Plates: So what we want to do is burnish peg and burnish the pivot holes in our plates, both the front plate and the back plate because we want to clean out any little bit of residues that may have gotten into that that the cleaner, the ultrasonic cleaner may not have gotten to. So to do that, I'm just simply using my dremel tool. And you can buy peg wood that is made for this purpose, and that is typically out of orange wood or dogwood. But a toothpick can do just as good a job, and it's kind of ready made for it. And to do the burnishing, all I'm going to do is turn this on, and then I'm going to just feed it through each of the pivot hole. To wear just cleaning those holes out. It doesn't take a whole lot to do it. And I'll do that from both sides to make sure everything is nice and clean. And then I'll do that with the back plate, as well. And just work my way through all of the pivot holes, get them nice and cleaned up, and then they're gonna be ready for the final assembly when we get to that point. So that's what we want to do with these to make sure everything's nice and clean as best we can. Okay, let's go on to the next lesson. Oh. 11. Polishing the Pivots: Hi, and welcome to this one and this lesson. And in this one, we're going to take a look at polishing the pivots. And what we need to do is take a look at the different wheels in our assembly. And, okay, we have the pivot. So we have the arbor shaft here. Here's the pivot. The pivot is what fits into our plate at the appropriate location. Spinning and keeping our movement working. And we want these to be as smooth as we possibly can to reduce the friction. So to do that, you can just run your fingernail across the pivot and you're going to be able to feel if it's rough or not. Now, this was a fairly dirty assembly, a fairly dirty movement. But when we cleaned it, it came out pretty nice. So now I'm just running my finger on the pivot itself and my fingernail, I should say, and it feels pretty darn smooth. If it's nice and smooth, then I'm going to call it good, and I'm going to go on to the next wheel. So if I take a look at this next one and I run my finger across it, this one feels a little rough. So what I want to do is I want to polish this. And by polishing, I want to take off the minimum amount of metal, the minimum amount of material as I possibly can in order to get this nice and smooth. So what I use is a micro finishing paper, and it comes in different grits. And so I usually start with a 600 grit, and then at that point, that takes off the bulk of the material, and it can get it down to a pretty darn smooth. Then I'll really polish it with an 8,000, 10,000, and even a 14,000 grit, and then I'll finish that by just burnishing it. And by burnishing, I'm just using bare wood, and I am compressing that metal down to where it's nice and smooth, but it's not really removing any material. Now, you can buy a jeweler's lathe and use that, and that's going to run you a few hundred dollars. You can get a pivot and burnishing file, and those aren't too bad. They're around $100, give or take, maybe a little more, or you can just make your own. And if you're just working on your own clock, you can make your own polishing and burnishing assembly pretty easily. So let's look at the table and see what I've put together. So here, I've just taken some popsicle sticks, and really, I've taken my micro finishing cloth similar to this right here. This is a 14,000 grit. This is a 600 grit. I label it on the outside, and then you can say I have been using this a little bit, and the tarnish that it has taken off, some of the pivots that I've already worked on. And what I'm going to do with this here is I'm going to go ahead and see about cleaning this up. And the easiest way to do this is I have a variable speed drill. So I just carefully pop this into the chuck and then close this down. I don't have to go real snug. And then when I turn it on, it's rotating nice and smoothly, and I'll start with my 600 grip. And I simply put this on the pivot right up to the shoulder of the arbor and keep in a firm grip on it. Alright. I just start working that. And then each time, I'm going to run my finger across it, and it's already feeling quite a bit smoother. So I'm going to go ahead and jump up to my 8,000 grit polishing cloth, and And I'll do that, and I'll feel it, see how it feels. And each time, this is feeling a lot smoother. So I like to take it down to a 10,000 grit. And then I can finish it off with a 14,000. And this will give it a nice clean polishing. You'll notice how dirty the arbor itself is. So I'm just going to put my 600 grit on the arbor just lightly. And you can see that's already cleaning that up a little bit. Now, it's the pivot that's the most important. But just to show how this polishing paper can start to clean all of this up. Then I'll turn this around, pop that in. And I simply come back, repeat the process on the pivots. Again, only doing the ones that really need to be addressed. Check that. And finally, I would come in with just some bare wood, place that on it. Keep a good, firm grip on this. What the bare wood is doing is it's burnishing that pivot. It's not really removing any material. It's just more or less compressing that metal down to where it's going to run even smoother. So I'm going to do that with all of the pivots that need to be addressed. And one final step that I'm going to do with this I'm going to come in with a piece of pith wood. And this is simply elderberry embucus that I went out and harvested myself, and the center of this is quite soft. It's pith. So I can take this, and once I have run this with the polishing cloth, I can pop this pith wood on and just kind of rotate this around. And what it does is it absorbs any moisture and any little contaminants that might be on there. Without having any effects on the pivot itself. So if you've got some sunflowers or elderberries somewhere close by, then you can go out and harvest that, and they both have pith on the interior of them, and you can use that pith wood. And like this one here, I've used it a number of times. I can always just cut this in half, and I'll have a whole another couple of faces of pith to work with. And that just helps to clean this up. So that's what we want to do with all of our pivots to make sure they're all nice and smooth and ready to go. And then we're going to go ahead and burnish the pivot holes in the plates themselves to get any contaminants out of that. And then when we put this assembly back together, these pivots and the pivot holes, the plate, everything's going to work and run really nice and smooth with minimum friction, and that's what we want. Okay, so that's the end of this lesson, and I'll see you in the next one. 12. Lubricating the Mainspring: Okay, so we have done the polishing of the pivots to get them nice and smooth. We went ahead and did the burnishing of the pivot holes in our front and back plates, using the dremel tool and just a toothpick to get some high speed inside of those holes and burnish and clean and smooth those pivot holes up so we have as minimum friction as possible when we do our final assembly and we have our train working properly. So if you remember, I took the main spring and the great wheel completely apart so that I could clean the main spring as thoroughly as I could. Well, when you do that, a lot of times that very inner coil where the arbor on the main spring the pin on that main spring wheel, great wheel, it gets distorted. The coil gets a little distorted. So I had to go back in with a screwdriver and some narrow needle nose pliers and just re bend that very inner coil enough to where the pin on the arbor for this great wheel would catch that slot down in the center. So once I did that, I was able to put it back onto the main spring winder, and I wound this down as tight as I could possibly take it. I really cranked down on it because I wanted to reshape that inner coil of the main spring. Now, when you're doing that, make sure you've got your safety glasses, make sure you've got a heavy glove, and make sure you're keeping the spring from bulging in or out. You want to keep it nice and flat to the great wheel. But I did that, cranked it down really tight, loosened it, and then cranked it down again to make sure that that pin on the arbor of the great wheel had actually engaged with the main spring itself. So I did that two or three times just because I'm cautious. I want to make sure this thing isn't going to blow up on me. And once I did that, now I have the great wheel and the main spring are reconnected. And what we need to do now is start looking towards final assembly. And before we do that, we need to oil or not oil, but lubricate this main spring to where it's going to work properly throughout the next few years. So that's what we're going to do in this lesson is just take a look at lubricating the mainspring and then we're going to be able to tighten it down, put the clamp mainspring clamp back on, and we'll be at a point of reassembling, putting this back into the movement between the plates, and doing our final assembly in the next lesson. Okay, now we're going to go ahead and we're going to start getting some lubricant into this main spring. And again, I've got the great wheel all reattached in here. So what I want to do is I'm going to use main spring lubricant, and you can purchase this through different clock supply houses. Time savers is one, mile high clocks is another. And this is built specifically for this application. What you want to do is have something that's not going to be so thin and viscous, it's going to tend to run out. You want it to be able to cling and hold on. But I'm going to just put a little bit into a clean jar. It doesn't matter what kind of jar. And that way, I can just dip my brush in and then paint the interior of this. So what I'm using is just this little craft and glue brush that I picked up in town, but any kind of a brush would work. If you have a spare oil painting brush that you no longer have any use for, this would work just fine, as well. So in this instance, I'm just going to go ahead and use this. And no matter what you do, you're going to get oil. So I'm going to put some protective gloves on. And at that point, I'm just going to go ahead and get some oil, and I'm just going to start painting the inside of this and I'm going to paint this around as best I can as deep into the coils. And I don't want to put too much, but I don't want to put too little. And as I'm applying this, I can see how it's adhering to the inside of the coil. And by doing just the inside, once you start winding this, then that oil is going to get or lubricant, I should say, is going to get distributed throughout this main spring. So I'm just working my way down as far into this as I can take it. And there's gonna be a point here at these inner coils when I'm not going to be able to get my brush down inside that. And at that point, I'm just going to paint across the surface. And that oil that lubricant is going to work its way down into those inner coils at that point. So I just keep working my way. You know, as long as I can get my brush down in there, I'm going to. And then, like I said, it'll get to a point where it's going to be difficult to get into that. So at that point, I'm just going to be a little more on the generous side while I put it in to these coils. So now I've pretty well got this lubricated the way I want it to be. So at this point, what I want to do is take it to the main spring winder, and we're going to get this set up, wind it down tight. That's going to help to distribute this oil. And then once we have the lubricant and this all tightened down, I can put our C clamp back on, and we'll be ready to do our final assembly. So let's go ahead and I will get over to the main spring winder, and we'll get going with that. Okay, here we are at our main spring winder, and we're just going to take this lubricated main spring, and I'm going to set it into my winder. Tighten that down. I don't want anything to slip. Then I'm gonna raise this up. And now I'm just gonna start winding this main spring down making sure now, you might have noticed it kind of flopped over from that side to this side and did a roll. If I release this watch what happens. When the pressure, the tension, the energy is released, the spring will lean back in this direction. When I start putting tension now look, it just kicked over this direction. It's starting to gain energy. I'm going to keep my hand over this. I want to make sure that it stays flat, that doesn't have any bulging. Gonna take this stand? And grab my main spring clamp and it fits over. I'm going to position that to where I get tension on this see clamp, and it's going to hold that main spring. And that looks pretty good. So my mainspring clamp is on there. I'm just going to put this bar across so where it can't unravel And now. Our main spring is confined. It's held tight, and we can go ahead and see about putting this back into the clock in the next lesson when we come in for the final assembly of our movement. Okay, so now we have gone ahead and lubricated our mainspring. It's been wound up tight. We've got the main spring clamp on it. So now that is holding it in place, and that's what we need to do. So now we're going to go ahead and we'll finish with this lesson now. And in the next one, we're going to take all these parts, and we're going to reassemble our movement and get it put back together. And then we'll talk about lubricating the actual pot pivot holes after that. Okay, thanks for watching and I'll see you in a bit. 13. Final Assembly: Alright, now it's time for our final assembly of our works. And all of these wheels, I took and polish the pivots, give them a good cleaning. And because anytime you're working on these, you always have the possibility of having a little bit of metal filings left over. So all of these wheels that I cleaned were put back into the ultrasonic cleaner to make sure that they're going to be nice and clean and ready to go. So I've already put in the main spring and the great wheel, the main spring that we lubricated in the last lesson, and looking at my diagram, I can see that the configuration shows my great wheel right here with the main spring coming down and then anchoring the main spring loop anchoring on the post down here in the corner, which indeed I have done, and it's anchored on this post right here. The second wheel is going to sit above the great wheel. So when I'm drawing my diagram, I'm showing the hierarchy. So the second wheel is above the great wheel, wheel number one, wheel number three, T three is sitting below T two. The teeth are below it, and T four is below that, and then our escapement uppear at the top. And then also just right here, is kind of a profile of how the motion works for working the hour and minute hand and how they sandwich together. So I remember how they pancake together. So I've done all of this that I as a reference. So with that in mind, I'm going to come ahead. Here's my wheel number two, T two, and I'm going to put it in the back pivot hole, and it sits above T one. And then T three is going to sit below T two. And then T three is going to sit below or T four is going to sit below T three. So there's my hierarchy right there. And then finally, I have the escape wheel, and it's going to go in. But the escape wheel, the wheel itself is on the outside of the top plate. So I'm going to rotate this just a little bit. Go ahead, place my beginning of my motion works in and And then finally the hour tube on top. And this is where it gets tricky because now we have to be able to fit this all together. So I'm going to just kind of position this, slide this in, bring it down. Now, the escape wheel goes on the outside, so I'm going to place it in the back pivot hole and bring it. There goes the second wheel. It's just right on the cusp. And now the third and fourth wheels got to swing around here. Okay. That'll keep that. I'm not tightening it. I'm just getting it down a little snugger. I'm going to turn this around so I can see this a little easier. And I'm going to Okay, so Okay. And I can spin this now that I have it on, and I can see wheel number three is turning or wheel number four down here is turning. Wheel number three is turning. Wheel number two is going to be bound up a little because it's tied to this. My motion works are in place. So now I can take my nut driver and just bring these down And then I want to look and make sure that my posts are snug against the plate. And these are just some post supports to get it up off the ground a little bit, so I have a little more room to work with it. So at this point, all that is working the way I would like to see it work. So again, I'm going to give it just a little more of a snug going at opposite corners. And at that point, I have fairly well put my escapement or not my escapement, but my movement back together. Finally, I have my anchor. I'm going to put that on and run that through. And then my clip to hold that in place. And now my assembly is basically complete. All I have to do at this point is release the tension and pull out the main spring clamp, and we should be good to go. So let's just go ahead and now to do that, I have to tighten my mainspring down enough to where I can release the clamp. And there goes my man spring clamp. Now, just out of curiosity, let's lift The escapement, the anchors are regulating and holding this. I can literally stop this with just barely touching it with my finger. So now I know all of my wheels are working properly. And I don't want it to unwind completely, I'm going to put my escapement anchors back in place. Put the clip back in place. And at this point, we're ready to come back and actually do the lubrication on the pivots and pivot holes, and then we're going to be able to put this in a test stand, and at that point, we're going to be able to start to get it in beat and regulate it. So there you have it. This diagram is invaluable especially for beginners on putting all of this back together and understanding how everything relates to one another. So there we have it, our final assembly. And so let's go on in the next lesson. We'll take a look at our final lubrication, and then we'll put this at a test stand and get it in beat and start talking about regulating it, getting it to where it's keeping the proper time. Okay, there we are. So I will see you in the next lesson. 14. Lubricating the Movement: Well, here we have our clock movement. Everything has been put back together. We've lubricated the main spring. And now what I want to do is lubricate all of our pivots, our pivot holes on the plates to where everything is going to be running with minimum or no friction. So we have a nice even movement. Now, you can buy oilers. That's what they're called oilers, which is just a small brass rod that is flattened that you can dip into a small container such as this one that I'm going to be using, and you take the oil not directly from the jar. You can easily get too much oil onto your movement. You don't want that. You don't want a movement to where when you have it sitting vertically in the case or on a test stand, oil is going to be running down the face of it. It's going to draw the oil out of these pivot holes. It's going to dry it out faster. So we want to be careful as far as that's concerned. So rather than putting it on directly from the bottle, I'm going to dispense a little bit into this container, and then I'd made my own homemade oiler, and all I did was take a piece of brass rod like this one right here, and I put it out onto my vise and took a hammer and flattened the end of it to where if I hold this just right, you should be able to Yeah, there we go. You could see how the tip of this is flattened out to a degree. And that's going to be able to pick up the oil out of this little homemade oil cup. And I just drilled a hole in a piece of doll and popped it in, and this works just as well as buying something. So the reason I'm doing it this way is if there's any contaminant on this, if there's any dust or dirt that's gotten into this, I don't want it to get back into this jar, and I don't want to apply too much oil from the jar. So that's why I'm going to go ahead. And just dispense some into the jar. And now I can come up with my oiler, and I can just take a little bit and bring it around and touch it, and I can really control how much oil is going on. I'm going to put it on the escapement here on the anchor to where that's running smooth. Now, the main spring, I have my click click spring, all of this. I probably should have oiled this before it's in the movement in between the plates, but I didn't, so I'm just going to put a little bit of oil on that rivet. So I know that's going smoothly, and I'm going to put a little bit of oil on the click and a little on some of the teeth of ratchet and I'm going to put just a hair on the click spring as well, and I'll just work my way through. I've got the second wheel right here, to put a little bit right there, and then I've got part of my motion works over here that pretty well takes care of the front of the clock. I will just continue that with the back of the clock as well. And then it's lubricated and it is ready to go into a test stand. So that's how we're going to do this. And in the next video, we'll take a look at it on the test stand and then put this into beat and then put the hands on to where we can get ready to get this regulated to where it is actually keeping correct time. Okay, that's it for lubricating your clock movement and your opinions. And with that, we'll go on to the next lesson. Okay. 15. Setting the Beat: Okay, we've lubricated the movement, and now I have placed it into a test stand. This is one I built myself, and it's got a slot up here, which will accommodate different sized movements. It's nice and stable, and I can just work with this as necessary. So I've got this in place. And so what I want to do at this point is get the clock and beat and make sure that everything that we've been doing up to this point is actually going to work. So all of the cleaning, putting it all back together, the clock is going to run because sometimes you just don't know until you test it. And it's easier to do it here where I can see everything that's happening within the movement rather than putting it back into the case and then trying to take a look and figure out what's going on. So what I've done is I've got a piece of painter's tape right along the bottom. And I'm going to take my pendulum and hang it on the pendulum rod. And what I'm going to do or actually, what I have done is, I'm just going to take a pencil and I've made a mark on the tape right where center is, right where that is at. So now I can start the pendulum, get it to swinging, and I'm going to listen for it to be in beat. And I'm going to be putting my microphone up close to the escapement, and hopefully you'll be able to hear what it sounds like, and we'll see if it sounds like it's in beat or if it needs to be adjusted at that point. By making a mark on the tape, then once I get this swinging and I feel like it is in beat, then I can mark where the outer swing is, the tick and the talk, so to speak. And then I can make a measurement, and it will tell me if it is indeed in beat you know, or pretty darn close without using a fancy, beat amplifier time tracks machine. So again, you know, for you at home who are doing this and working on your own mechanical clock, this is going to get you in close enough. So let's go ahead and start it up and hear what it sounds like. So I'm just gonna put my microphone up by the escapement, and we'll see what this sounds like. So when you listen to that, that tick and talk are not even. So what I'm going to do is to see about getting it into beat is I'm going to lift this side of the test stand, just a hair, and I'll lift this side of the test stand, just a hair, and we'll see if it sounds better or worse. So let's go ahead and give that a try. And what I'm going to do is I'm just going to hook my microphone up onto the movement, and then I'll lift each side and see what it sounds like for us. Much worse. To my ear, that sounds better. And these are adjustable feet on the bottom of this stand, so I can adjust these that sounds pretty even to me. So now we can say, we are in beat. This clock is ticking. The tick and the talk are even to each other or pretty darn close, you know, to my ear. So the next step is to actually go ahead, put the hands on, and then we will be able to regulate it or make sure it's running at the right speed to keep accurate time. So again, because I'm going to be working with this, I'm going to stop the pendulum. And then I'm going to come in. The hour hand simply compresses on. So I'm going to have to stand up here for a moment. And I'm going to put the hour hand on compress that in and then the minute hand goes there's a little rectangular anchor to it, so it goes on that and then the nut that holds it in place, and I don't have the dial on it. So I'm just going to arbitrarily set this to 3:00. And what I can do is I'm going to make a note of the time that I've set it for the date today. I said it for 3:00 P.M. And now, What we do is we let this run for about a week, and we see how it's doing and see how much time it may have gained or lost in that time. And I'll check this every 24 hours just to see what the progression is. But one week will tell me really what the amount of time it is either gaining or losing. So that's what we're going to be doing now. So at this point, I'm just gonna let it run, and I will see you in about seven days. Okay, thanks for watching. I'll see you in event. Oh. 16. Regulating the Movement: Okay, so here we have our clock movement. It is in the test stand, and I have set this up to regulate the time, meaning I want it to keep accurate time. And what I've done is I've put the hands back onto the clock, and we've got the pendulum going. I've got my um tape here on the bottom that is giving me an idea of where center is, when it's sitting still, when the pendulum is just still. And then I've made marks as far as the swing is concerned, just to give me an idea of how evenly it's going on side to side to where I can determine that the beat is pretty darn close for my purposes. What we will end up doing is putting this in its case and then doing the final beat adjustment at that point. Right now, I just want to make sure I can even get it into beat. So to do this, and set this, and I made notes. And with these notes, I said that on January 7, I set the clock to 12:50 P.M. It was wound, and I checked it 24 hours later, and it was 5 minutes slow. So I made sure it was wound and I reset it, and I adjusted the rating nut one quarter turn to raise the pendulum bob up just a hair to make this run just a little bit faster. So when you're looking at your clock, and I'm going to lift the pendulum off, at the bottom of the pendulum, you've got slide this up a little knob that's called the rating nut. And that rating nut is what you do to adjust the speed of the pendulum and that adjusts the speed of the clock. If it goes up, and we're going to have some clocks chiming here, then it's going to be beating faster. And if I bring this neural knob down, it's going to beat slower. So I've adjusted that one quarter turn and then I came back 24 hours later, which is today. So the ninth. And it was still running approximately 4 minutes slow. So it's still running just a little bit slow. And so I went ahead and I adjusted that rating nut another half turn. And I'm going to monitor this every 24 hours, the beauty of being in a clock shop, monitor this every 24 hours and see if I need to adjust this pendulum bob up just a little bit more to where I can set this and regulate it and have it keeping very good time. Right now, it's pretty much right on, but I just adjusted it a few moments ago. And so it is where it's supposed to be. So we'll see what it's doing in another 24 hours, and we'll just monitor that throughout, and then that's going to give us an idea we've got it regulated and keeping proper time. And at that point, we'll be putting it back into its case, and then we're going to be able to do the final adjustment to make sure that it is keeping good time. And just for a quick interest note, if you have a clock, here on the face of it, I've got some stamped information. One, it says that it's an Ingraham, and I know this is hard to see. Let's see if I can't zoom in a little bit. So the name Ingraham, the city where it was manufactured. And then on this side, we have a nine and on this side, we have a 28. So this movement was made in September of 1928. So this movement is what? 97-years-old, almost 98-years-old now. And you can see how much it has cleaned up since we first started. And again, this movement is almost 100-years-old, and it is working very, very well. So it's just a matter of taking care of your clocks and servicing them, keeping them clean, keeping them oiled. And you can have a clock that will run for who knows how long indefinitely. Okay, so that's what we're doing with regulating and getting this to keep the proper time. So next time around, we will be putting this in its case and taking a look at doing the final adjustments to keep it in beat and keeping good time. Okay, thanks for watching and I'll see you in a bit. 17. Into the Case: Okay, I have put the clock back into his case, the movement back into his case. And no, I don't have the face on right now. I just wanted to make sure it was all working and still in beat inside of the cabinet. And we can see our pendulum is working. It's keeping nice time. It's keeping very good time overall, considering I don't have a beat amplifier attached to this, I'm just adjusting the beat based on my ear, and it sounds pretty darn even to me. And the fact that it's keeping good time helps to confirm that. So we've got this on the wall. I was very careful to put it back in. Not having the hands on, not having the pendulum on initially, while I put it in and reattached it inside the case. So at this point, I'm happy with this movement. I'm happy with the job we did, and it's working properly. So there's the final test right there, and we've got it back on the wall. So, um, the face that I have for this isn't don't believe the original face that came with this clock, so I'm going to be looking for a new one. But aside from that, it's working properly. So with that, we're going to go ahead and go into our last lesson and just kind of have a quick recap on our care and servicing. Okay, thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 18. Polishing Alternatives: Okay, an earlier lecture, and when we were looking at polishing our pivots, we were using something along these lines. It was just like a little popsicle stick, and I had taken some polishing cloth and glued it on the inside, cut the stick, and then made a hinge with some tape where you could hold it almost like a small vice around the tip of the pivot, and then while the drill is spinning, we're polishing the pivot. Well, the more I thought about this and this had been recommended to me, the more I thought this just didn't seem to be as effective as what I would like to see. So what I've done is if we were using an actual pivot file, which by the way, you can purchase, and they run about oh, $100. And since this course is designed for homeowners who just want to do a little bit of work on their own clocks, buying $100 pivot file seems a little extreme. So I put together my own version, and it's basically just an evolved version of this little Vice thing here. And what I've done is I've just taken some scrap wood, and I've put get this oriented, and I've put 600. This is 600 grit wet, dry sand paper that I just use double sided tape and put it on. And I made another version at 1,500 grit wet dry. And I even went so far as an 1,800, and I label all of them to where you know what it's going to be when you look at it. So this is an 1,800 grit polishing cloth and even an 8,000 grit polishing cloth. So I can use these, and when I'm using them rather than trying to grip the pivot between the polishing cloth or sandpaper with something like this, if I was using a pivot file, I would be having if the pivot is swiveling or spinning, I've got the file on the low side, so I can always see that pivot. So now I can just use this, and if this wears out, it's easy enough to replace. And then when it comes to the final polishing or burnishing, I've just got a small Arkansas whetstone, put a little bit of my clock oil on this, and then I can hold this to the pivot, and at that point, I can get a nice clean burnish to it and finish it off. So this might be a more effective application than trying to use something like this. And like I say, easy to put together, easy to acquire these. And certainly within the budget for someone who just wants to work on their own clock at home. So I just sort of throw that out as a little bonus lecture, so to speak, and an alternative to working with these things. Okay, that's it for this short little lesson, and I'll see you in a bit. 19. Course Wrap Up: Okay, so we have come to the end of our course on the care and servicing of a time only mechanical clock. And we walked our way through how to make a diagram of the hierarchy of the wheels in the clock movement that you're working on so that you know how to put it back together when the time comes. We've talked about how to restrain the main spring to where you can remove it from the works safely, and then cleaning that and lubricating it before you put it back in using the spring winder. We've gone ahead and cleaned all of the wheels and plates of this movement. I used an ultrasonic cleaner, but you can use just a tupperware tub, put your cleaning solution in to the proper concentration, and let it sit and soak for 30 minutes or so, and then you can come back with a soft toothbrush and give it a scrubbing and get all of that grime and as much of that old oil and dirt out of the works as possible. I rinsed it in distilled water, and then using my air compressor, I blew all of the extra water out of the movement out of the wheels, dipped it into 91% rubbing alcohol to help absorb any residual water that may be in there. I went ahead and blew it off again using the compressor to get much of that moisture out as possible. And then into the oven on a cookie sheet at 180 degrees Fahrenheit for about 30 minutes. Do not put anything in that's going to have plastic or anything that could melt. You only want the metal parts of your movement in there to dry out and really bake all of that water out. Then we came back, put our main spring, which we lubricated back into the movement, put all of our wheels back in again, referring to the diagram that we had drawn, and then we lubricated the movement itself, all the pinions, the pivot holes, and put it back together, got it into beat using the test stand, and then onto the wall where it's keeping really good time. And remember, this movement is almost 100-years-old. So taking care of it, maintaining it, cleaning it, keeping it lubricated, and it can run for another hundred years. So anyway, thanks for watching. I'm really happy you were part of this course. Pick out an old movement, find an old clock that isn't necessarily dear to you to practice on before you start working on something that is of value. And in the next course coming down the line, we'll be looking at time and strike movements and how we address those a little more involved. But remember, you have a strike train, you have a going train or a time train, and so we're going to be looking at it from that standpoint. Okay, again, thanks for watching and I will see you on down the road.