Longcase Clock Service & Repair. Clock restoration, cleaning a grandfather clock.

Here's a quick interrupt to proceedings. Just received this grandfather clock for repair According to my friends on the open clock club. It's a 18 early 18th century long case clock Well made lovely pillars here And it's got an hour wheel Support here, so a lovely piece of kit Things wrong with it well It wasn't working One of the gut lines is missing on this side here we have a Pendulum chime, which obviously has been taped up to make sure it didn't make too much noise the The hammer is actually attached to this strike arm with a blue tack and an old matchstick So that needs to be put right Other than that looking at the chime can't we all hear the There is a bend in the lever here, so it's not Going on the snail. Yes, so a lot of things to Look look at but I think mainly a good clean will get this going nice One thing I noticed at the bottom here There is a broken lever Wasn't sure what that was but now found out that is a latch for the pillar one of the pillars and you can see this pillar here has actually got a Key way on it where the latch would have been on to it We now have pins holding the thing together, so this isn't actually used anymore so Next step is to strip this down. I've ordered some new Synthesized a gut line here both sides to renew that so we'll strip it down and see What it's like? one thing I noticed was all the pivot points have been Attacked with punches to put the hole in the right position It seems to be the case and almost all the pivot points. I Imagine that probably something that was just done As a norm to get things exactly right, but we'll see when we take it apart how well space the wheels are And whether any tensions needed there, too Okay Come back to you after we've put this through the cleaning bath So before I take a clock apart I always take plenty of pictures it makes such a difference when it comes to putting a clock back together again All the clock needed in the end was a very good clean All the bushes were okay on all the wheels so all I did was Put the wheels through the ultrasonic cleaner and brushed Cleaned the rest of the components The original chime bell was smaller than and it didn't meet the hammer so I had to end up making a brass plate, which I attached to swing the chime bell nearer to the hammer and That meant I didn't have to make any alterations to the brass movement Here is the movement on test Using my homemade test stand And here we are back at the customer's house the lovely looking movement in this case and the customer was Pleased to hear the sound of the ticking and the chiming and it's just as she remembers her mom's clock performing many years ago