Polished the clock arbors
After about 8 hours of work across two days, I have all of the gears cleaned (not yet polished) and all but one of the arbors finished and ready for lacquer.
After a little trial and error, I found a (long) process for restoring the arbor shafts in the clock. I put my grandfather’s trusty old wood lathe to task. Fortunately, it is an old belt drive workhorse that can gear down slow enough to work with metal.
I first used a high grade cross hatched machinist file. this took down just enough metal to remove most of the pitting. I followed that with a finer cut file and then some emery paper. Next I used three grades of wet sanding paper - 400, 600, and 1000 grit. I made a bit of a mess with the black water that splatter off the rotating arbor but that’s what my old yellow conference shirts are for (grin). the last step on the lathe is steel wool saturated with break fluid. The brake fluid is slightly detergent so it helps clean up from all the previous steps. I finish with “polish” buffing compound at the buffing station.
The top-left picture is an overview of the parts from this weekend’s efforts.
The top-right is the reverse-preventer. It was the in the worse shape of all these parts. You will notice, just after the toggle, the shaft has a reduced diameter for about 1.5″ and then returns to normal. This are was all torn up and at some point, a little brass sleeve was slid on to cover the damage. It took me about an hour to grind our all the damage and create this ’step-down’.
The bottom-left is the arbor that hold the gearing for the “minutes’ hands. This is the only arbor that was fully detached from any gears. (It’s in the lower left in the first picture.)
The last picture is not very telling but I included it because it is unique buy being brass, copper, and steel - all bonded together. Unfortunately, this gear is nearly fully obscured in the finished clock.
ttd = 26
April 8th, 2007 at 18:51
Wow Glen - they came out beautiful! Like new.
April 8th, 2007 at 19:38
While the clock parts look about 100 years younger, my hands have experienced the reverse.
April 9th, 2007 at 08:26
You sure that’s the same clock we picked up
April 9th, 2007 at 08:41
funny that I was starting to think the same thing. The clock we pulled out of Chicago was in tough shape. The cleaning process is coming along nicely. The big hold-up is the weather. I really need to start spraying primer and finish or else I’ll be polishing everything *again* in a couple of weeks.