I found this old clock about six months or so ago, maybe a bit longer, abandoned in one of the trucks I was driving back then and it was in a bag of rubbish that the previous driver obviously hadn't bothered to take out. I was sat waiting to drop off steel plate at some God forsaken steel mill and decided to have a play with it. I wound it up and gave it a shake and it started ticking away. I set the alarm and that worked too! I couldn't see what was wrong with it. Right, I thought, I'm having that!
So, I got it home and set it up, having noticed that it had stopped. It was pretty much fully wound up and so I gave it a shake and it started again. Herein lay the problem. It stops all the time. It was put away and I forgot all about it.
I started to tidy my man crap room up yesterday, and found it again! I took the mechanism out of the casing and started to look at how it worked. I also noticed that somehow the alarms' spring was no longer set right and it wouldn't wind up. I took the spring out and tweaked it to fit onto the post again, it has a notch in the spring that locates over a sticky out bit and it wasn't sitting correctly. Whilst the spring was out, I got my WD 40 pen and lubed as much of the mechanism for the clock as I could. I refitted the spring, wound up both the alarm and the clock and set it going.
So far, it has been running since yesterday lunchtime. I have needed to adjust the speed on the clock with the use of the little + or - lever on the back and it seems to be keeping good time. It is currently back in its' casing, but I wouldn't mind putting the mechanism into a wooden casing, maybe carved from some birch! It could well be a constant companion on trips from now on, the tick-tock, tick-tock sound is very soothing and it's not a bad keeper of time! If i can change the face though to a more subdued look, it looks just a bit too gaudy at the moment!
