Neglected 1900 Seth Thomas Clock Restoration

Hey, how's it going? Next up on the bench we've got a Seth Thomas clock and this one was made in 1900 and this case is in pretty good shape. The directions on the back explain a couple different things. One is how to adjust the beat rate of the clock and you could do that by using the key from the front which is a pretty cool feature. So let's take a peek inside and see what we're looking at here. So there's the key and the the weight for the pendulum. So take a look at this verge. It's definitely not factory. Looks like there's been some sort of modification made so I'll have to take a little closer look at that in a little bit. So that looks like some sort of nail from the case so I'm not sure where that fell out of but the case seems to be pretty solid to me. All right, let's see if the clock chimes. That seems a little harsh to me. Something doesn't quite seem right there. So I'm just going to put a little bit of a wind on the time side of the clock just to see if the if the clock actually runs. Wow, look at that. Started right up. It's ticking so that's good news. But there does seem to be a problem here. So there's there's something wrong and hopefully I can find out what's going on once I get the movement out. So before I can get the movement out I got to get these hands off. Those are held in by a pin here. So this is some sort of felt washer of some kind maybe but it is just saturated in oil or something. It's it's squishy and it's shiny. I'm not sure what's going on there but that doesn't seem right. All right, so this movement's held in by four screws so I got to get those backed out and then the movement should just pull straight out. So before I take this movement apart I've got to let down the main springs. So I'll use some zip ties to secure those and use a tool I made on my lathe to let the main springs down. So here I'm just unwinding the spring in a really controlled manner and the zip ties will hold the the springs in place and that'll relieve the tension off the rest of the movement. So now that both springs are let down it's safe to start taking the movement apart. To get these plates separated there's something I have to do on the other side of the movement first but this hammer would be in the way when I flip it over and I couldn't really figure out a good way to to get around that so I decided just to remove the hammer and get that out of the way first and then I can flip the movement over. Well this is why the chiming sounded so harsh. There should be a leather tip there not a screw so I'll have to get that fixed and that's just covered in grease. That's not good. Now that the hammer is out of the way I can flip the movement over and and get these parts disconnected so I can pull the plates apart. So that's the beat rate adjustment rod and it's accessible from the front of the clock right above the 12 mark on the dial and it can be turned to the right to make the clock run faster or turn to the left and the clock will run slower and I wasn't careful enough there and broke that pin so I'll have to find a replacement pin for that and I'll use this wire here when I get everything put back together. I'll just cut it to size and and shape it the same way that the old one was. So now I can get this plate off and it is stuck. It is really stuck. I'm not sure what's going on. Looks like the escape wheel is stuck and I don't know why but it's it's not allowing me to get the plate apart. There we go. That's some sort of indication of a big problem I think and it's just covered in grease. If you could only smell what this movement smells like it it doesn't smell pleasant I can tell you that. Now these mainsprings are extremely greasy just really dirty and I decided this is the time to figure out how to clean and lubricate mainsprings and it's going to be my first time doing it and a little bit later on you'll see how I do that. I'm pretty sure and I'm no expert but I'm pretty sure that hair is not supposed to be there. Get that out of the way. That scared the shit out of me. You saw me jump. There's something going on with the mainspring and it's probably because it's so dirty. I think that the mainspring has some sort of hardened grease or dirt. It causes the spring to stick to itself and so it doesn't wind and unwind smoothly and so it was probably stuck and it finally gave which made it pop like that but man that scared me. So there's a lever on the hammer that engages these pins on this wheel and that's what makes the the hammer strike. So this is the center wheel and it actually goes all the way through the front of the dial and it's what the hands connect to. So this is a fan on the strike side of the movement and it actually slows down the the striking so the clock doesn't chime too fast when those gears are in motion. So when the beat rate's being adjusted by using the key it's actually turning this screw which raises and lowers this part which the pendulum is hanging on. So when the pendulum bob is lower the clock will run slower. When it's higher the clock will run faster. So that's a really cool feature they've designed into this movement. Another cool feature of this clock is you can actually set the minute hand back and this is a set back lever that allows that operation to to happen without damaging anything within the movement. So this is how the crutch wire is supposed to be connected to the verge but this is how it's been repaired. So I decided to build my own clock mainspring winder and this is what I came up with. It's kind of a combination of some factory-made designs and some DIY designs. This is literally the first time I've used this mainspring winder and so I'm kind of anxious to see how it actually works. And it looks like it's working the way it should. I can lock it, get the zip tie off and let's see if I can unwind the spring now. And it's really important you wear a glove and a face shield when you're dealing with these mainsprings because these mainsprings are super powerful. They can do a lot of damage if they get away from you. And yeah this spring is really dirty. You can see some hardened grease or dirt there. This causes the spring to stick to itself and that's why it it kind of gave way on me earlier. So now I got to get the wheel disconnected from the spring. So there's a hook on the arbor that hooks into a hole on the end of the spring and so you got to hold the spring and twist the wheel back and forth. And it took me a while but I finally was able to get the wheel disengaged from the spring. And you can see there there's a little bit of a hook on that and that was in a hole inside the spring. So now I can get this spring cleaned up and what I decided to use was some WD-40, a rag and some steel wool. So what I'll do is I'll just go a section at a time. I'll just scrub with the steel wool and then wipe it with the rag. And I'll go to another section and do the same thing and go all the way down the spring. So I went until it was pretty hard to pull the spring out. I was getting nervous about putting a kink or a bend in the spring so I stopped when the coils got too tight. And I did this whole thing about three or four times and then at the very end I went over the whole spring with a rag just to wipe off any extra WD-40 because I didn't want to leave any of that behind. So the innermost coils are pretty tight and what I decided to do is just put a rag in there and clean off whatever I can and that'll have to be good enough. So I'm gonna go ahead and get this wheel cleaned up before I attach it back to the spring. So I'm just using water and the ultrasonic cleaner and then I'll scrub it with some soapy water. The water probably could have been a little bit more soapy but that's okay. And then I'll finish it off with mineral spirits. So I bought some keystone mainspring lubricant. There's a medium and then there's a light and I decided to buy the medium. And then I just go over the whole spring with this lubricant and I think that's all I need to do. Now I need to get this wheel connected back up with the spring. So I got to get this hook on the side of the arbor into a hole in the innermost coil of the spring. And it took a lot of fiddling but then I finally got it and the spring isn't hooked on the arbor. So I didn't get it engaged correctly and it's it's slipping off. So it took me a long time to figure out what was going on and the innermost coils were wound so tight that the hole at the very end of the spring was being blocked by the next coil. And so I had to get those separated just a little bit so the hole wasn't blocked and then the hook on the side of the arbor was able to actually go into the hole and hook into the spring. Well this was the first mainspring I ever serviced. I think it went pretty good. Cleaned up pretty nice. It's shiny and ready to go. Now I can take care of the other mainspring. This one's for the strike side of the clock and I'll just go through the same procedure as I did for the other one and we'll just see how it goes. Both of these mainsprings are a little set which basically means that they can't really expand to their full potential which isn't a huge problem. It basically just means they won't run for their full eight day period that they were designed to because they won't have the enough potential power stored in them. But these are the original springs to the clock. They have the Seth Thomas logo on them and I don't think it's worth replacing them with nice new shiny springs or anything like that. It looks like I was able to get this arbor hooked onto the spring first time around so this one went a little smoother than the last one. So now it's time to get all the other parts of the movement clean and get all that grease and dirt off of everything. Now look how worn this pivot hole is. This is from the escape wheel and I think this is why the escape wheel was having a hard time turning when I did my first test and why the escape wheel was stuck when I tried to separate the plates. So this plate had so much built up grease and dirt that I decided to go over everything with a pick first and then I'll clean everything with a toothbrush. So I think now's a good time to give a shout out to a viewer of my channel, Dave from Canada. He's got many years of clock making experience under his belt and he reached out to me and offered to help me out and so we've been talking back and forth and I've been asking him questions and he's been giving me tips and tricks and it's been really helpful. So I really appreciate when you guys leave comments, suggestions, and subscribe. It really gives me the motivation and the confidence just to keep going and it's a lot of work to film everything and to edit it and to do voiceovers like this. It takes a lot of time and I just really appreciate it and thanks again. For some reason this fan is really dirty just on this one side and I'm not quite sure how that happened. You would think that if it's going to get dirty it would get dirty on all the surfaces but it's just right here so I'm just going to go ahead and scrape it off and make it look a little bit better. I'm beginning to think that this whole movement was sprayed down with some sort of grease or oil or something. You know if someone sprayed something on the movement maybe it only hit the fan in that one spot and so that's where all the dirt and grime accumulated. There's also just a general greasy film over everything and what happens is all the dirt and hair and dust accumulate and stick to all this grease and creates a kind of a gritty compound and causes a lot of wear on all the different movement parts and that's why that pivot hole was so worn because this movement was never properly disassembled and cleaned in the right way. So you know it just accelerated the wear on the clock. So I'm not going to do a whole lot to these hands. You know I'll clean them up, wipe off any grease or anything like that but I'm not going to be too aggressive. These hands look like they've been blued which is a kind of a heat treatment to protect the metal and I don't want to chip or scrape any of that off so I'll just clean it up a little bit and that'll have to do. All right so now it's time to fix this worn pivot hole and this will be the first time I've ever done anything like this so we'll see how it goes. That groove is where the pivot was stuck when I was trying to separate the plates. So what I'm going to do is use a set of broaches to make the existing pivot hole bigger and then I'll insert a new bushing into that hole and that should do the trick. First thing I got to do is measure the pivot size and the thickness size of the plate to know what type of bushing to get and it's a size number 20 bushing. One side of the bushing is flat and the other side is beveled and that acts as an oil sink. So the diameter of this bushing is 2.68 millimeters so the new hole I make has to be smaller than that and then the bushing is going to be a pressure fit into the new hole and it fits the pivot just fine. There's a few important things to mention here. One is I'm going from the inside of the plate to the outside and I'm trying to keep the broach perpendicular to the plate and I don't want to have the new hole be at some weird angle and I'm also pushing the broach away from the wear so that the hole is centered where it's supposed to be. If not then the new hole might drift into the worn area and cause the new hole to be off-center. So there's a few things I'm trying to do here all at the same time. It's a little bit difficult but I'm giving it my best shot. All right so this broach goes up to 2.67 and the diameter of the bushing is 2.68 so I know that I can go all the way up to the very end of this broach and maybe stop a little bit shorter and see how the bushing is going to fit. And it looks like that's going to work so now I can press it in. So I had some extra aluminum rod from making the mainspring winder and I'm using that as a push rod on the drill press. For some reason that was such a satisfying sound. I'm just so happy that it that it fit in there like it should. And there it is and the other side and it looks like it might be slightly off-center but clocks aren't precision instruments so I think it's close enough and we'll just have to see if that'll do. And there's a little bit of tilt which is good. From what I read a 5 to 10 degree tilt is kind of expected. Now I'll just do a couple tests just to make sure that everything's functioning the way that it should and looks like everything's going to work out. So now we can get everything back together and see how the clock runs. So the beats per minute that the clock ticks at determines if the clock's running too fast, too slow, or just right. And this number can be calculated by counting the teeth and the pinions of the wheels that go from the escape wheel to the center wheel. So I counted all the teeth and the pinions and did this simple calculation and determined that the clock should beat at 176.87 beats per minute. So what this number tells me is if I can get the clock to tick at 176.87 beats per minute then it shouldn't run too fast or too slow. It should run just right. However in a real world scenario the beat rate isn't static. It'll slightly change over time and that's why you have that beat rate adjuster to make tiny adjustments as time goes on. But having that number as a target right after I assemble the movement will get me close to where I need to be. That way I'm not fighting it for too long. So the movement is stamped with three and five eighths there on the plate which was used in the Seth Thomas adamantine mantle clocks around the 1890s to about 1902. And this was the first type of movement used for the adamantine clocks which is pretty interesting. And they were phased out around 1900 to 1901. So this particular clock with this movement wasn't made after 1901. So adamantine is a celluloid veneer which is glued to the wood case and it comes in different colors and patterns. It was developed by the celluloid manufacturing company of New York City and in 1881 the Seth Thomas clock company purchased the exclusive rights to use it which is pretty interesting. So I've been trying to get all these pivots lined up into their holes and it's a pretty tedious process. So what I normally do is I start in a corner and get everything set there and work my way around until everything just kind of clicks right in. And now that everything's in place I can tighten down all the screws and see if the gears are spinning the way they should. So this is the new wire that I'm using since I broke the old one. So I just got to bend it to shape and it should work out just fine. So now it's time to get the hammer put back in and this has got a pretty strong spring that wraps around it. So what I decided to do is use a piece of pegwood to kind of hold it in place. Now I need to get these zip ties off these springs so set the clicks back and wind up the springs a little bit which should take the tension off the zip ties and I can just cut those off. Now I'll just do a quick test of the strike side of the movement just to make sure I put everything back together the right way. It should stop in one of those deep notches and there we go. Now we can get everything oiled and we're getting really close to the finish line here. So I decided that I would keep the verge and the crutch wire as is even though it looks really ugly. If it functions fine and it doesn't cause any problems I'm not going to spend the extra money, time, and effort to make it look pretty again. So if it doesn't cause me any problems I'm going to keep it that way. So the clock is ticking even without the weight and it's on its back so that's really good news. So I'll just show a little bit of how I cleaned the case. I just went over everything with a small paintbrush and some water. This took a long time so I'm not showing all of it. That's just basically what I had to do to get the case cleaned up. So I never did really figure out why this washer was so oily and greasy. If my suspicions are correct and the whole movement was just sprayed or soaked in something maybe that's why though the washer got so oily. But it did seem to dry out while I was working on the movement so I didn't I didn't end up doing anything with it. So now I'm going to do a proper test of the striking mechanism and it'll strike once at the 30 minute mark and then at the top of the hour it'll strike the number of times for that hour. And you can see the levers move up the warning pin catch the warning lever and then release. All right so it's ticking just fine. The escape wheel isn't showing any problems anymore. So I got the clock assembled properly which is good but this crutch loop is a little bit too big so I'm going to shrink that down a little bit. So the last thing I'm going to do is fix this hammer get rid of that screw. I suspect that the leather that was originally there fell out and someone just threaded in a screw. So I bought some new leather and it threads in perfectly actually and it doesn't come out. So I'll just cut that down to size and see how the clock sounds with that. Well I think that sounded way better than it did before. So I used the adjuster and I got the beats per minute to be 176.87 and I tested that for a few days and it kept good time. So I think we're all done here. I really appreciate you guys taking the time to watch. Take care.