Drive Assembly – test fit
I “borrowed back” the drum arbor from the machinist so I could clean it up a bit and test fit all of the brass parts to the drive assembly. (I still need to give the arbor back to the machinist to clean up the end a bit more.) The results are, to paraphrase Carl, “not the same clock we picked up”.
Obviously, this is my attempt at the “before” and “after” pictures. I discovered the drum plate on the end was cast brass. As such, it will never get a mirror shine. It has enough casting imperfections that it will only get a satin appearance. I have not finished all of the polishing steps yet – so it will be somewhat better – but I am not expecting to see a reflection when I finish.
I have not taken any of the gears through final buff and polish yet but curiosity got the best of me. I had to see what the assembly looked like so I slid on the drum, catch gear, drive-train gear, maintaining gear, and the retaining collar.
(BTW: I can guarantee I don’t have all of the gears in the right order because I just went back and referenced my disassembly documentation. the maintaining gear and the drive-train gear are reversed.)
ttd = 28
Hi Glen,
The clock is gonna look sweet when it’s running again. Thanks for posting pictures of the work as you progress.
Best,
Roy.
glad you are following along. My pics don’t tell a story nearly as well as your Tabblos. Also hope you didn’t catch the website in the midst of my image compression marathon. I discovered WLW has been making fat JPEG files so I downloaded everything. compressed them and uploaded the results. Some pics were off-line for a few minutes.
Hey Glen –
You are very kind thank you. I have a question about the clock. What kind of mechanism does it have to enable setting the time? Does it have some sort of clutch or freewheeling capability?
Best,
Roy
The arbor corresponding to the minutes hand has a square end. This allows for a sizable “T” handle to be placed on the end and turned. You can see the end of arbor (passing through the pilot face) in my post about “cleaning with catchup”.
The train gear on this arbor is “attached” by friction. There is a (very) brief description and a picture in the post on “Methods for gear attachment”.
The friction plat allows the arbor to be turned without advancing the gears of the train. At the other end of the arbor is the gear that connects to the lead-off up to the motion works. So, turning the “T” handle, moves the minute hand of the pilot face and subsequently moves the “big hands” on the exterior clock faces.
oh right- you did splain that before.. Sorry – fergut.. The question came up today because I was reading the book Early American Tower Clocks and came across the notion of freewheeling or disengagement of the pallets to fast forward the time train. The book said it was a risky procedure when the pallets were re-engaged.. I don’t particulary understand why that would be risky..
I can’t find the section from “A rudimentary Treatise …” but I recall reading somethign about this. To the best of my recollection …
If the motion works (the mechanism directly attached to the large exterior hands of the tower clock) is rigidly connected to the going train (the clock gear mechanism), then, in the event the hands of the tower clock freeze, become damaged, or otherwise get ‘stuck’, the clock will attempt to keep running and will force the works. This could break any number of parts in the clock. The worse case scenario is that it breaks a gear that decouples the drive weight(s) from the escapement. Since the escapement is the only think slowing the gears down, the results would be catastrophic as the gears accelerate in a “run-away”. You can imaging the force of a 200lb weight falling 50ft down a tower !
I found the source I was looking for -> http://www.horology.com/htr-towr.html (down near the bottom).