Antique Clock Restoration - The Complete Job - Part 5, Bushing and Depthing.

Hello and welcome back to the series on repairing an antique table clock. In this episode I'm covering mainly the process of bushing the clock. This is where wear has been introduced into the bearings, usually from extended use of the clock with the lubricant, the oil having been broken down and dirt introduced into the pivot holes and this has caused the the bearings to wear. I start by centering the plate in the milling machine. I'm using a good stout center point to find the center and then clamping the plate down and drilling out the hole. With a little smear of Loctite I can then hammer in a bush. In this case this is a bush made from cast brass that I've turned up and it was hammer hardened brass which was then turned in the lathe and I'm further hammer hardening it through the process of riveting it into the plate. I take great care not to strike the surface of the plate, I'm only hammering the bush material itself. So with the bush in I can reduce the surface of the bush to bring it down flush with the plate. There are various ways of doing this and most of the time it's not a good idea to come tight to the plate so that you actually mark the plate, but in this case the clock had already been filed around a good bit and I wanted to try and create a nice flush surface so I did it this way. Now the center hole can be opened up using a and brought to size for the bearing for the, in this case, center wheel. It's important, you can see here I'm doing it, it's important to sort of sight the broach. You need to make sure that you're broaching 90 degrees to the plate so that the arbor is going to be straight within the plates. If you broach through at an angle that can cause lots of problems later and tightnesses between the plates. This is in a smoothing broach running through afterwards, I'm using a little drop of oil and that burnishes the surface of the brass and further work hardens it. What I tend to do is to broach slightly tight so that it's not quite loose enough and then the process of running the smoothing broach through does actually open it up a little bit further and allows that little bit of freedom that's necessary for the bearing. And just removing the burr is just a simple process of using a burr in a pin chuck in a pin vice. Final little wipe through with a piece of pegwood and the center wheel front pivot is now looking much better. It's important to have a little bit of freedom side to side. The wheel has to be able to rock as I'm demonstrating here. If you don't have that then the bearing is too tight and it will cause problems with tightness in the clock. You can just check it between the plates. Sometimes it can feel altogether different between the plates than it did in your hand in one plate. In this case it's good and I'm happy with the end shake and you can see the wheel is standing parallel. Now moving on to this rather nasty repair I suppose you could call it. This was a previous way of dealing with the wear in the front bearing front bushing of the of the fusee on the going side and they've actually riveted a lump of brass on drilled it and pinned it which is not a particularly nice way of doing it but hey-ho it's how they decided to go about the repair. Rather than actually pushing it as we would they've added this this piece of brass the front to take up the wear. Firstly I needed to drill out the the pins that had been riveted over so I just center popped them as you saw me doing there and then drilled them out. I'm not drilling right the way through I'm just sort of destroying the peened over area and then I'll bash them through with a punch. Obviously there's a lot more bushing required on the smaller bushings higher up the train but I thought I would just use this video to focus on the larger and more involved bits of bushing work. Almost every bush in this clock in fact I think it was every single bush in this clock had to be reworked so it was quite a lot of work just on the bushing and depting front. With the pins removed I could take the nasty repaired section off and have a look at it and then we can see the extent of the of the wear on the on the actual bush. This is the original part of the bearing on the plate. We're going to have to plug these holes up to get rid of the extra holes that have been drilled and bush the front bearing as we would normally. Back over to the same process of centering in the milling machine. This is by no means the only way of doing it some would say it's probably not the best way of doing it but it's a way that I've found works for me. I don't always use this process but I do tend to use it on larger bushes like this. So with the plate centered up and clumped down onto the milling machine then swap it for in this case a sheet metal drill which opens up the the hole to a nominal size. I'm not taking much material off I always like to remove as little material as possible and it will give me a nice parallel and round hole at a nominal size that I can then make a bush for. In this case I'm actually plugging the hole rather than making a bushing because I'm fairly certain that the center of this is not quite right. It's worn its way down elongated quite a long way so with a fusee or with a great wheel on a on a long case clock it's important that the winding arbor actually comes out center to the dial winding hole because you can't do much about the dial and if you confidently go about bushing the plate and then come to put the dial on and realize that your winding hole is winding arbor is no longer in the center of the winding hole then you've got problems. So I tend to if there's any doubt use this method. So I plug the hole up completely and then I've made up this tool so I make the brass part to suit each individual clock so that will go in through the the winding hole and it's a nice snug fit and sits down against the the dial but it also sits down so I'm getting it parallel flat against the plate so I'm I'm certain that I've got the center captured now and a little center pop and that should have left a divot in the plug that we've made and that gives me an accurate positioning for that winding hole. It wasn't a long way out but it was far enough out that it would have not looked very good. So I start off with a center drill just to make sure that the drill is not going to wander and then follow it through drilling it to a nominal size that we can then broach from and after broaching the the hole out by hand with the clockmakers broaches you can see that the fusee is restored to its original position. Now it was just left to make up some cast brass plugs for the the holes that had been drilled in the past so when all of this is cleaned up later it should be a fairly invisible repair. Nobody would be ever the wiser that that horrible great thing had been riveted on in the past. Same deal with the strike train it's always a good idea to check the the fusee is actually centered to the winding hole in this case the the arbor of the fusee the square is a little bent so it does wobble around and this is often the case but it is not as long as it's not too exaggerated it's it's not too much problem. Then here's the plate after it's been cleaned up. I'll try to do sort of minimal intervention on the cleaning up front but this plate had been so badly worked on in the past that I did have to be a little bit invasive with my cleaning in removing scratches and file marks and things. Now onto the back of a fusee bush here you can see it's been previously bushed and then this is then in turn worn also the back of the center wheel again you can see the dirt in the pivot hole still and you can see the bit of a mess that they've made of the back of the fusee here and you see what I meant earlier about the fact that this plate has been filed around quite a lot when these bushes were fitted. So first thing I'm going to do is get rid of the old bush and see what we're left with and in this case the surprise was that it's had a plug threaded in so they've actually tapped the plate and then they've put it probably a brass bolt or something in I don't think this is actually a commercially available brass bush that screws in you do see those from time to time and they're quite nasty but I think this is just a process that somebody has used to to hold the bush in so it's not the nicest way of doing it and it's not the way I will be doing it. So here's the bush removed and we need to restore the fusee to being standing upright within the plates so using the same process as before I've centered the plates and then clamped to the table of a milling machine and drilled out the old thread the threaded section then a smear of Loctite and a bushing made from cast brass hammered in and peened riveted to work harden it and also to hold it in. I needed to machine a slight recess to get the end shape correct for the fusee and then I could install the fusee and check it between the plates and see how well we've done. Now it's important on a five pillar clock to always pin the center pillar it's tempting when working on the clock to only stick the four pins in the outer pillars and and see how you're going but then when you're assembling the clock and you put the fifth pillar pin in you get a nasty surprise when all the end shakes tighten up and here's the fusee running nicely between the plates and standing upright and everything's parallel and as it should be. So there's a bit of scarring on the back plate that we'll need tidying up later. I need to firstly check the engagement now that we've worked on the fusee this is known as the depthing in the clock here you can see the depthing between the great wheel and the center which is the the area that I'm working on at the moment so it's important to check this between the plates you can also use a depthing tool and sometimes that is necessary you will see me using that later but it's important to see how they mesh actually in between the plates because it can differ from in the in the depthing tool and just spinning it as I did then doesn't really tell you much other than that it's free you actually need to hold the the pinion that's being driven and feel each individual pinion leaf as the tooth corresponding is coming through engagement and you will then be able to feel the the true depth it should feel as smooth as you can possibly get it it's not at all notchy. As I'm doing here apply a light pressure and you'll be able to feel that tooth coming all the way through engagement and as I say it should feel really silky smooth just verifying there's an end shake and I'm happy it's also important just to check that there are no clashes so as things are in their extremities of their end shake that nothing can come into contact because that's a common cause of faults wheels dragging against the back of other wheels and so forth and here's another example this time from the strike train showing me checking the the engagement between a wheel and pinion in this case I'm using the depthing tool and this is over on the strike side now I'm just verifying the location of the of the bushing hole to make sure that the the mesh is as perfect as it can be sometimes you do have to just move the hole around a little bit whilst bushing in order to to get this depthing right and in a clock believe it or not it's important that everything rattles if it doesn't rattle it won't go so you'll often see a clockmaker performing the rattle test thank you very much for watching I hope that you've enjoyed the video if you haven't already done so please do consider subscribing and if you know anybody who may be interested in this video or any of my other videos then please do share it with them thanks very much see you on the next episode