Antique Tall Case / Grandfather Clock Disassembly tutorial

Hi, I'm Antique Clock Specialist Gary Sullivan. I'm here at my shop surrounded by a number of antique grandfather clocks, or as we call them, tall case clocks. They were all made in the late 1700s or early 1800s. And the reason I'm making this video is because people are constantly asking me, How do you transport these clocks? How do you disassemble them? Aren't they too valuable to even handle? The fact is they are quite valuable, but they're really not all that difficult to disassemble. So my goal here is to demystify them a little bit and share the do's and don'ts, some of the things that I've learned through the years about how to handle an antique clock. So the one that I've selected to demonstrate with is a clock made by Simon Willard. He was one of early America's most significant clockmakers. He had several inventions that were important to the industry. And the first piece of advice that I would give before disassembling an antique clock like this is to get some help. If you're not familiar with them, it's better to have an extra pair of hands to help with the process. So when I approach a clock like this, before I disassemble it, there are some things I want to look for. First, I want to look for loose components. Very often these finials on the top can be loose. They may fall off, so I want to check those. If they are loose, I'm going to take them off. There are three major components to be dealt with here. The largest is the case itself, and any antique clock from this period would be made the same way. There's the basic case, a removable hood. This section is called the hood. Inside here, we have the works for the clock, which consist of the dial or the face, and behind that are the brass works, the gears that run the clock. Now, one important thing that we want to check for before we remove the hood is to look in here and see if the weights and the pendulum are in the clock. Here we have the two iron weights that drive the mechanism, and we have the pendulum here for regulating the time. And they are actually hanging from the works, and they're rather heavy, so they stabilize it. So, once we've determined that the weights and the pendulum are, in fact, on the clock, we can then go about removing the hood. If the weights and the pendulum are not on, then we need some help to take it apart, and I'll demonstrate that later. So here, we're not going to grasp the hood by these columns because they're not always as secure as they should be, so we don't want one of those to come off in our hand. So I jiggle the hood a little bit left to right. They're very often sticky, but they will slide forward. And then I support the hood with one hand and reach up for the molding. Now, in the process, I want to be sure that this door doesn't swing open and hit me, so I'm going to hold that closed with my thumb. Sometimes you can lock it. And we just slide it straight off. Now, as I'm sliding it off, I want to look at the back of the hood and be sure that that doesn't catch on the back of the dial and pull it forward. Now, in this instance, it clears nicely, so I slide it straight off. And there's the first step in disassembling an antique grandfather clock. So now we've got the hood off. We can take a peek inside and see what's going on in here. You can see a little bit of the brass movement from the side. You see at the top is the bell that strikes the hour. Now, this board right here is called the saddle board. It's very important. The works are actually bolted to that saddle board, so when we remove the works, the saddle board is going to come with it. It's just sitting on the sides of the case here. Now, if we look inside the case, we'll see the weights hanging here from their cords. We can actually follow the cords up and see where they wind around the drums of the movement here. We also can see the top of the pendulum. It comes all the way up and hangs right here. And this is the spring at the top of the pendulum that bends as the pendulum swings back and forth. Now, this movement is very secure because the weights and the pendulum are on it, but sometimes they're not. Now, if you wanted to disassemble a clock that did not have the weights and the pendulum on it, you'd have to do it differently. So let's put the hood back on for just a moment. And this is what you would do. This is where you need a helper. So the movement is just sitting in there. It's not stable. No weights and pendulum hanging on it. So I'm going to slide the hood out a little bit and have my helper reach inside and put their hand on that saddle board to stabilize it. As I slide it out, you see the saddle board right here. Your helper is going to hold that down while I remove the hood, and then the two of you can take the works out of the case. So I've taken the works out of the case and set them onto this stand. This is part of an old clock case, but it's open, so it'll make it easier to see exactly what the process is to take this apart. So you can see this is the works that were in the case with the name Simon Willard on the face. And if I rotate it around a little bit, you can see what was not visible while this was inside the case. And there it is. So you can see the pendulum hanging here and the weights with their cords. And you can see the cords winding around the drums of the movement here. So before I remove the weights, there's something that I need to do. I've got a few pieces of tape here. I'm going to temporarily put some tape on these neatly wrapped cords so that they don't come off while I'm moving it. And very often the cords are made of brass or steel cable, as opposed to the string that these are. This is what happens if you do not put tape on the cords. Particularly when it's brass cable, it can get all tangled and make a mess, and it's very difficult to untangle this. So we don't want that to happen. So now that the cords are temporarily taped in place, I can go about beginning the disassembly process. So let's just pretend that this is still in the case. So what I'm going to do is reach in and disconnect the right-hand weight, which is the time weight. I take that off first. I can set that down. I can then remove the strike weight. Set that down. So now what remains is to remove the pendulum. This pendulum has a wooden rod. Very often the rod is made of steel. And here it passes through this piece, which is called the crutch. It's connected to a very thin spring here, which bends as the pendulum swings back and forth. And then there's a little knob at the top here that it's suspended from. I want to be careful not to bend this crutch when I remove the pendulum. When I lift it up, I'll take the pressure off with my right hand, slide it out of the slot. And very carefully bring it down through the crutch without bending the crutch. Now that it's disconnected, I'll set it down in the case. And the works are free of the case. I can lift them right out. There's the set of works connected to the saddleboard, ready to be packed up and transported. So now you know how to disassemble a talking squat.