1917 Kienzle Clock Repair Attempt

Hello again. I'm back with another clock to repair. The story behind this one is I was talking with a few neighbors and one mentions that her husband has an old clock that doesn't work, so I offered to try to repair it for them. This is a Kienzel, one that I had never heard of before. I did some research on it and learned that the company was founded in 1822. By the 1880s they were making 500,000 clocks a year. By the early 1900s it was up to a million per year and by 1939 they were also making watches. In 1974 they became the largest watch manufacturer in Germany and they are still in business today. I want to show what I found when I opened up the back of the clock. Let me just turn it around. The first thing I noticed written on the back of the door says 24th of April 1917 which would make this clock 106 years old. Also tucked inside here was a small ziploc bag and in it I had one pendulum as well as the second one. I don't know why there are two in here. Of the two, this one looks older. There is also a key to the clock and one small part which is hard to see but this looks like the little click that catches the ratchet wheel when you wind up these clocks. That's what makes the clicking sound. And another small part that I do believe is what is supposed to attach the pendulum to the clock. Let me zoom in a little here to try to show you a closer look. It's hard to see exactly how the pendulum is going to hook up here. This whole chime mechanism seems to be blocking my access to it so I'm going to look to remove this first. So let me get set up for that and then I'll continue. But first I'm also noticing that the hammer seems to be bent. It's not lining up properly on the chime here. Kind of a dull sound and this appears to be attached by just one nut on the bottom of it. So I'm going to look to undo this and actually remove the entire chime from inside here. So as I said let me get to work on that and then I'll continue. Okay let me just turn this over and let's see what happens when we undo the nut. That wasn't bad. Next I'll take a closer look in here to see if I can figure out how to hang the pendulum and then we'll continue. Okay I have figured out why I can't hook the pendulum up and let me show you what it's about. It goes back to the piece that I found earlier which I thought was part of what holds the pendulum. This is actually part of what's called the pendulum suspension spring. It's broken and the other piece of it is stuck in here and I'm going to try to remove it. Clocks that are not as old as this would have a screw to hold this in. This one's over 100 years old and it has what they call a tapered pin. I'm going to try to tease it out of here. Okay this is this is the pin. Okay I held it and the other piece that's broken is that together it looks like this and the pendulum hooks onto this little pin that's down here. So what I have to do next is find where I can get a replacement part and that could take some time but once I have it I'll be able to hang the pendulum from here and see if the clock is is even working and even if it is I still will most likely want to disassemble the whole thing, take it apart, clean and lubricate everything. I really don't know if this clock has ever been serviced in the past or not. So let me see if I can come up with a new part and once I do we will continue. Okay I was able to come up with a replacement spring. Thank you eBay. I'm going to fit it into the little slot here and doing so you're not going to be able to see my hands block the view so I'm just going to go ahead and insert it and then we'll continue once I have it in. I was able to attach the spring and I'll try to show you how it looks. You can see the tapered pin through that little bracket there. The spring is attached. I hooked up the pendulum arm and what I'm going to do now is attach the pendulum to the bottom of this. I'll stand the clock up, check to make sure that it's wound and see if it works. So let me set all that up and then we'll continue. I've hung the pendulum and I'm trying to wind it. What I'm seeing is this is the spring for the time. This is fully wound. I can't budge it at all. The spring for the chime is broken. It just freely spins. It's not clicking or staying put which means that that spring is going to have to be replaced but for now I'll give the pendulum a spin. I'm going to rotate the clock around and give it 10-15 minutes to see if it runs. I was hoping I could get it to run for at least a few minutes but it turns out it's stopping after just a few seconds. So what that means is I have to take out the whole mechanism and let down the spring. Hopefully that'll free it up so that when I wind it again it will work. So let me take a closer look and figure out the best way to approach it. Most likely I'm going to start on the front. I'll take off the hands and then unscrew the mechanism from the back. So let me set this up and we'll get started. Okay the hands are held on by a tapered pin so I'm going to try to remove that. Okay There's the mitt. Okay now I believe I can turn it over, undo the screws that are holding the movement, and remove it from the back. So let me work on that. Just use a little towel to protect the glass. I'll try to zoom in for you. And what's holding it in are eight screws. It'll take a bit of time for me to undo them so let me loosen them all up and when I'm about to remove the movement from here I'll continue. The screws are out. Let me try to remove it. That's rather complex I would say. Okay I'm going to spend some time now taking a real close look at this and see if I can figure out a safe way to take this apart. And one of the first things I got to do is let down the spring. So let me work on that and once I know what I'm doing we'll continue. After looking more closely at this it's such a complex clock movement that if I can get it working without having to take it apart I think I'll be ahead of the game. What I have found though is that the reason the chime spring can't be wound is because it's missing the click which is this which I found in that little bag at the start. And it locks into the ratchet wheel here. Usually these are screwed into position one here one up here but on this clock they are riveted in place and apparently the rivet here broke off. So I've come up with a small screw which I hope will fit in here and I'm going to try to position it and screw it down and we'll see if I can wind the chime spring. So let me work on that and then we'll continue. I can also mention that although I said I thought this was riveted in position I tried to look underneath it's really hard to see but there's a chance that this is actually screwed in from underneath. In which case how the screw came out of this one I really couldn't say but let's see if I can get this in place. Okay now let's see what happens when I turn the key. There you go it is working how about that. All right next step is going to be I have to let down the main spring and I think the easiest way to do that I'm going to remove this small sort of spring that holds the click into into position. I'm thinking okay good. Now this has got to be a little careful with because it can really spin quickly. There we go the spring is let down. Next I have to put the spring back on here. Okay and I should be able to wind this a little bit now. All right what I want to do next is I'm going to place this back into the clock case hang the pendulum and see if it runs. So let me get set up and I'll work on that. Okay I just have to secure this now with the screws. Once that's done I'll be able to stand it up hook up the pendulum and we'll see if it runs. So let me work on that and then we'll continue. I have everything set up but unfortunately it's still not running. It just goes for a few seconds and then stops. So what I'm going to have to do is remove it and open it up, disassemble it and hopefully a good cleaning and lubrication will fix this. It must be areas that the gears are just binding in there and it's just not turning. So let me remove it and then we'll take it from there. I've got it removed from the case and I can take this apart either from this side or from this side. But this is so complex looking I would rather not mess with this just yet. So I'm going to work on it from here. First I'm going to remove the pendulum spring. There we go. Just let that hang and we have four nuts holding this back plate on and some kind of little pin. I'd almost call it a cotter pin. Let's start by removing that. Okay there we go. I really think I should be able to remove this as well. Get it out of the way. There we go. Next I'm going to undo these four nuts that are here. Okay what I have to do next is try to remove this plate and first I want to take a closer look at it to make sure there's no other parts I have to take off before doing that. I'm concerned about this here as well. So let me take a closer look and then I'll continue. What I'm going to try to remove is the pendulum arm here. There's a couple of screws to undo and the hammer I wanted to remove as well and it appears as if this is held on with one of those tapered pins. I'll try to show that. It's right over here. I just have to kind of tease that out of there. Okay like that. All right now to try to remove the hammer. That came out easy. Not exactly coming off so easily here. Let me take a closer look at it try to figure out what's going on here and then I'll continue. I haven't been able to figure out how this comes off so what I'm hoping for is once I have the plate removed this whole arm and the hammer is going to come with the plate. But before I do that I have to make sure that as this comes off I don't disturb the position of any of the gears in here. So I'm going to be doing this very slowly and once the plate's off then we'll come back. As you can see I was able to remove the plate and this arrangement of gears is the most complex one that I've come across. So what I'm going to do is take some photos of this arrangement and each time I remove a gear I'll take a photo so I have a good record of exactly how everything goes back together. One problem I've run into is that I can't remove all of these gears. Some of them are attached to the gears on the other side and I'm a little reluctant to undo both sides at the same time but I'll show you what I am able to remove. Let's see we have this. That comes out. This one does not. That comes out. And that's pretty much it. So what I plan to do is I'm going to clean up and lubricate the pivots and the plates here. Do the same to the ends of the gears and then I'll look to reassemble it and see if I get lucky. One thing I am noticing is that in the springs I do see some evidence of rust which could be the main problem for it not to be running. So I'll try to get in a little bit of a synthetic clock oil in there to see if it helps to free it up a bit. So let me work on cleaning it and I'll put everything back together and we'll take it from there. What I've done is cleaned and lubricated all of the parts as best as I could and I have reassembled the clock by reversing the steps that I took to take it apart and I have to say it without a doubt was the most difficult clock to put back together that I've ever worked on. What I'm going to do next is reattach the suspension spring and the pendulum arm. I'm going to place this back into the clock case and then I'll hang the pendulum and at that point we'll be ready to see if it's working. Everything is back together and I have to say despite my efforts it's still not working. It just goes back and forth for a few seconds. I really don't know if it's mainly because of the rusty springs if those need to be replaced. That's really the only thing that I can see that isn't correct in here but I really don't have a way of fixing that. Definitely disappointing that I couldn't get it going. I haven't posted any videos of clocks that I couldn't fix in the past. There have been some but I'm posting this one because I thought it was a pretty cool clock especially the fact that it's from 1917. Not often I get to work on clocks that are well over 100 years old. Anyway, that pretty much wraps things up. Bye for now and better luck next time!