The subject line says it all really, in that we had an expensive pocket watch in with broken glass. The glass was particularly thin and nothing “off the shelf” was ever going to fit. So we made our own.

We did this by cutting the glass blank with a ceramic lathe to exact diameter and then, having made a jigg, used a glass furnace to recreate the original convex curve. The end job is indistinguishable from the original although it is stronger, perfectly polished and a peffect fit.

The cost for this, including a very thorough service was under £1000 on a chiming gold pocket watch valued at around £7000. We are brilliant value for money and have equipment which others simply dont have. I genuinely believe that this job would have had to go to Switzerland for serveral times the cost and I doubt the job we made of it was not just incredibly cheap but also the best possible results in terms of quality finish, materials and strength.

I dont usually do bragging articles but the reason I am doing so on this occassion is that if you a have smashed special fit glass we can do it and we are one of very few organisations that do.

Brilliant job of which we are very proud.

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Ok I did an opinion article and I owe the blog a good tech article for the clock enthusiast.

Spring driven clocks are not accurate without a fusee movement. Thats a massive controvercial statement in clock terms. It means that your grannys 1960 mantle clock probably tells the times accurately twice a day. You dont notice because you get the time from your phone or your watch or the TV. But its true.

To qualify this I am making this statement only in the context of pendulum clocks with a short (say 6 inch max) pendulum. The almost direct opposite applies to long case clocks with long pendulums.

A pendlum clock can be simplified into three elements. 1. Power 2. Gearing 3. Regulation. This is the device that divides up time. It could be a pendulum or a balance wheel or a verge escapement or and atomic decay cycle etc. Notice that I have not included any category for hands and face because I clock does not have to show you its working to be accurate. Displays vary. Mostly they are dials but then you get barometric devices that output a line to a graph paper on a drum that rotates on a weekly basis. Its still a clock in essence.

Now, given that you have these three element the most important thing is that everything continues to whizz and whirr at EXACTLY the same rate. This is achieved with item 3, Regulation. Regulation in a pendulum clock is pereformed by…the pendulum.

A pendulum with a fixed centre of gravity will continue to swing at the same rate if no friction is applied. The friction is the bend in the spring at the top of the pendulum, the light touch on the crutch fork on each swing and air resistance. A pendulum of about 1 metre will swing at 1 second per swing. It will only slow down because of the friction wind/string/crutch friction. Forget the crutch thing – just consider wind and the bendyness of your pendulum as the things which cause friction.

Ok so you swing the pendulum with pallets. Describing this is going to be a challenge. So…

The spring is the power plant that turns/pushes the cogs leading up to the top of the clock. Its essentailly a mini engine connected to a gearbox of gears. By the time the spin has been passed from cog to cog – usually about 3 “wheels” (cogs) the last cog is spinning freely at hundreds of revolutions per minute vs the very slow crawl of the power plant at the start of the gearing down process.

So what you end up with is a turning wheel at the end of all that. The wheel is cut so that it looks rather like a cog but is nothing of the sort. Its rather like a cog but each tooth is a sharks fin. Theres a reason for that.

You see that top sharks tooth wheel is the thing that makes the pendulum swing. It does it by getting each tooth, in turn, to push a pallet. A pallet is a bit of flat metal connected pretty directly to the pendulum. So as the sharks teeth pass the pallet it nudges the pendulum one way and by the time the pendulum swings back it blocks the path of the pallet again and the process repeats.

Even if you didnt really understand that what may have occured to you is that the push from the sharks tooth has to be hard enough to counter the friction from from the air and spring friction.

If the sharks tooth is pushing hard enough the clock keeps going becuase the pendulum keeps swining, and if its stops then it means the pendulum is not being pushed hard enough by the pallets due to dirty gearing and no oil.

That was so hard to explain in a few paragraphs. If you didnt understand it then you may be suffering from “brain cavities”. I think I may have brain cavities because Ive just read it back and, bearing in mind I wrote it, I can barely understand it. Right. Whats a fussee.

I said your grannys clock isnt accurate. Then I explained how a clock works. The reason I did this is that if you get the first bit about a clock being a simple device to measure how many times a pendulum swings a minute, then the fusee is an easy extension of this.

The whole point of having a spring and a gearbox in a clock is to push just enough energy into the swing of a pendulum to counter the friction forces. Its a tiny amount of power to add to the each swing. Imagine swinging a your friend on a playground swing and keeping them going at the same rate by breathing in their direction. If you wanted to keep your friend swinging you just covid cough in her direction and off they would swing. Interestingly they would swing a bit further if you coughed hard and less so if you just coughed normally.

Now, a spring fully wound will cough harder than one at the end of its infection. This means that Newtons laws of physics are violated by the input of extra power to the system thereby creating an artificial, and therefore intrinsically innacurate method of regulation should the extra power going into the system reduce. Which it does.

The reason I just scientifically upped the stakes with my last sentence was that your so far through this that Im betting you will carry on….maybe. I will never know to be honest as Im too busy to check the website statistics which all appear to be in Greek – Its all Greek to me.

So the fusee is an ice cream cone shaped cotton reel, or larger. that acts as a variable ration gearbox in the cog sequence in which it is second. The first is the spring. The spring drum and the fusee ice cream cone are connected via a chain or wire which wraps around one or the other. If its wrapped round the spring drum the clock is unwound. If its wrapped in ever increasing diameter loops round the ice cream cone then the clock is fully wound.

[When the clock is fully wond it has a stop system inside that wil not allow you to move the key further. Its solid and distinctly different from the normal wind pressure. The reason its there is so that you dont give it the beans and snap the fusee wire – these clocks have and easy but long wind to accomodate the “gearing”.]

Fusee movement were invented……ages ago. I have to idea but Ive seen them on clocks to 1700 and I think 1690 (im not sure it – was an expensive bracket clock) so quite early on. I think the reason it did not become a standard feature were multiple

1. Difficult to engineer the ice cream cone drum on which to wind the wire from the spring drum. This is not at easy bit to make. Firstly you have the problem that it cant be lathed without a lathe capable of operating from a copy or being programmed. Imagine having to make a perfectly accurate helter skelter from brass. In 1680. Evidence of Aliens as far as Im concerned.
2. Maintenance. This system is more complicated. It has less set pieces you could stamp out of a sheet or cut with a jig. The implications of the string snapping on a full wind (which is obviously the point at which its most likely to snap) are slightly horrific. All the energy from a 55mm x .5. x 100mm spring releases into the clock putting immense recoil pressure on the first wheel. This means the gearing on the ice cream cone goes flat. You loose a tooth or two. This is SPECTACTULARLY expensive to get repaired. I wont do one. Affordably.
3. Its all very well having these brilliant methods of transferring torque and mixing things up a bit to get what you need. It is. You see the majority of fusee clocks we see are not 17th century guilt portable chronometers (pffft – accurate to a minute a day if its working), they were school and station and company clocks. Utilitarian devices. They were designed simply, and oddly, to a build profile common to all manufacturers, and they HAD to show the right time clearly, hence the tendency for mid sized (12″ white face) to large clocks . You cant miss your train because the clock is worng. You cant be late for work and argue your clock is more accurate than your employers. These clocks, these municipal and railway and council office clocks are BRILLAINT. They say so much more about the leap of our society where you didnt turn up and 8.47am and leave at 5.25. You worked 9 to 5. Hard. The other delightful thing about them is that wood they used was not veneered. You get solid plank with varnish and polished. The simplicity of the external design and the high specification of hard wearing woods is fit for purpose, but of course we know the longer terms benefits now. Most have knock mark which shows its not from Marks and Spencer and there is even a key on some (“I wasnt late – look at the clock”). The star is of course the movement. The plate, pallets, arbours, bushes, the whole lot could have come out of a  Messerschmidt 109e (plane, ww2, sorry. It was awesome) for the build quality. They cost a sunken galleons treasure chest to restore mechanically but your cant repair good quality with bad quality. Well you can actually. Punch bush, flatten and reposition the escapment, polish the arbours. To do it properly you need a spring change and that bit is not fun. Its 55m of .5mm carbod steel held with alloy bendy wire that has to go into an aperture with 2mm tollerances, usually with some sweaty mods to the coil size with a spring winder. If it uncoils half way through Im Ok. Thats because I wear a full really expensive full leather apron, gloves fit for Apollo and one down from a welding mask.

FOR SOME REASON, PROBABLY TO SAVE YOUR ENGINEERING “I CAN DO IT” MENTAL ILLNESS, DO NOT CHANGE A SPRING. ITS HONESTLY REALLY HAZARDOUS. THE PROBLEM IS THAT IF YOU LOSE CONTROL OF THE SPRING, IN THE PROCESS, THE EDGES, BEING CURVED, TAKE AN UNPREDICTABLE PATH AS IT UNFURLS.

THIS HAPPENS IN A SECOND AND CAN HONESTLY MAIM / BLIND / REMOVE FINGERS. EVEN IF YOUR CONFIDENT DO NOT UNERESTIMATE THE FEROCITY ON AN UN-CONTROLLED SPRING RELEASE. ITS A FLYING KNIFE SNAKE.

We live in a country where healthcare is free to all. As we are all aware people who work in the NHS are all part of a big team put together to keep us alive and without the need to worry about huge medical bills as well as your illness.

Thats absolutely brilliant but the people who enable this system are underpaid for the risk they take to save your life.

We are due another stretch of covid variant and the nurses and hospital porters and surgeons are going to risk their lives to save somebody you know. How can you thank people for something like that. Also this time last year we were all outside clapping the NHS staff whereas now we seem to be taking it all for granted and see it as our own problem with the NHS less considered.

I cant cure a covid sufferer or even guess how to help with the medical side of things. What I CAN do is make the lives of those who put theirs on the line is offer my services at a 50% reduced rate.

So thats the new policy.

If you work for the NHS then you get a 50% discount on all labour charges up to £500 (I cant extend this to parts cost unfortunately).

Thank you to all NHS workers. What you do is really appreciated and courageous. I dont care if you work in the back office or do the laundry or your a surgeon – your all fine people and Ill happily work at a discounted rate for you because we know you love your clocks and we love you!.

There are some limits on how far I can go with this as I have to pay the bills too but Ill make your clock bills good deal easier to pay. If you could mention your NHS employed and send a pic of your NHS ID tag in your initial email then Ill make sure you pay a good deal less than…people who dont work for the NHS!. The other thing I can do for NHS employees is staged payments. Ill work on a 3 month staged payment plan if this makes your life easier. Thats what Im doing. Not exactly saving a bus load of nuns and kittens, but something at least.

You probably dont work for the NHS and are reading this purely because you read my blog. Have you thought about what you could do for NHS workers?. Its not something that immediately springs to mind when all we hear is bad news but Im sure there is something you can do for NHS workers somehow. I dont know what that might be or how you might implement it, however, these people do and will need our support. A donation to the NHS is laudible but does it get through to the people who do the work and take the risks?. Call me cynical, but I doubt it. If you can do something directly for an NHS employee I would say that its the way to go. that assumes you want to help and you can. If you dont and you cant then fair enough. Im not trying to change the world or judge anyone. I mean fine. You sit there with scantily clad maidens feeding your peeled grapes and then call an ambulance because you need your fingernails cut. Medically. And your not paying. I mean do you have to pay for everything. What are the overheads? Clippers I suppose. No, theres not judgement going on here.

Joking aside, if you know an NHS worker why not offer an open invitation to dinner once or twice a week so they don’t have to cook when they get home. It sounds odd and overly personal but thats how I grew up. There was more community. And how much time does a nurse or hospital porter get to mow the lawn or wash the car. I know it all sounds rather high minded and vaguely religious but when I grew up in the 70’s people were like this already. You knew your neighbours as friends. Things were just more socially integrated despite the absence of Facebook/Meta and computers. People did spend a long time on the phone mind you.

My point overall in offering an NHS discount is more about that sort of thing. Its got nothing to do with money from my point of view. Theres no publicity, no headline, just what I hope will become normality. Quite frankly it went wrong with the digital watch in my opinion. I was getting my first Timex Junior when the rich kids had red LED watches that lit up and told you the time in writing!. As an aside, Ive had three since, each of which has failed almost immediately and seems unrepairable but I still love them. Anyway, given that there is a chance of the NHS getting overwhelmed I believe its probably time to think about offering support, in whatever way, to those on the front lines.

I rarely do this type of article because who cares what I think. People want to know what I know about clocks and hear about interesting clock related things, however, there is a tenuous link in that Ive had a few NHS customers recently and the only reason they got their (prior) 25% discount was that I tend to get to know my customers to some degree and they obviously mention or refer to their work.

I cant become “Dr Clock” and just do NHS work so Ill have to limit it to a couple of clocks per month but that allowance should be more than adequate. If it goes over this estimate then Ill either cut the service and offer it to certain people on a face to face basis, or ill cut back the percentage or limit the financial elements in some way. Just a warning!.

Ill do a clock article now.

I am shutting up shop for the holidays from 4 pm Saturday the the 18th of December. I will still be working but the workshop and the Saturday clock clinic wont be operating until the 8th of January 2022.

So, The workshop closes for xmas between 4pm Saturday the 18th December 2021 to 10am Wednesday the 5th January. The first clock clinic runs on the 8th – this is for simple low cost fixes and quotes / collections / deliveries and runs every Saturday normally.

I will be working at my home workshop during this time except for the 4 days of Christmas inclusive of the two bank holidays.

Most of the rest of the two weeks I will be available on the phone to book a a January call out or just offer a bit of advice e.g. a 3 minute phone call about how to set up your new cuckoo clock.

If you need me to come round for something urgent then just give me a ring. I cant promise any specific availability but I expect to be doing at least two call outs while the Antiques Centre is closed as is normally the case over the Christmas shut down.

My number is: 07462 269529

Email: admin@braintreeclockrepairs.co.uk

So, dont be afraid to ring. Things are happening and Christmas is just an inconvenience as far as I am concerned although the idea of working from home for a couple of weeks does appeal to me greatly!.

Have an excellent Christmas, be the best you can be and remember Christmas is about other people so get round and visit those who might me lonely or felt forgotten. Im 55 and Im lucky if I get 3 people visiting but then again, I live with my two sons so I always have company. Providing I can sabotage any girlfriend relationships they may attempt to engage in I should be able to have them around for quite a few more Christmases.