radio and clock

[zipgun]

Biggie in my kitchen, thats a fake £1 coin at 6 ,wire buried in the plaster, always set other clocks by this one ,'less there's been a power cut! It was painted with hammerite by an idiot, which luckily has no adhesion to bakelite and i scraped it all off with my thumbnail .I do like a proper clock or two, they're my pension fund ,and of all my collection this is my favorite.. (and i like little French movements in Edwardian marble /slate cases. Cheap as chips, no-one seems to realise their movements are pretty good)


Old radio JPB.. came with the clock above , i plugged it in , some valves glow but no sound.. not even a crackle . Bin it, or any good to ya? cardboard on the back is crumbly..

[JPB]

Ooh, synchronous clock me likey. I'll post some pics of my decent ones at some point, probably tomorrow when I get bored in the office. I also have an American synchronous clock. I had it apart several times to ponder the impossibility of its habit of only reading 50 minutes for every hour. Damned transatlantic 60Hz mains.......

That Philco might be worth shoving on eBay for parts but I'm afraid it's not much use to me as I have (as usual) a queue of other folks' wirelesses to complete before I dare bring any more orphans home.

Ta for asking though.

[rich.]

im a big fan of old clocks, id like an art deco marble one but wifey doesnt like them...

[zipgun]

No one wants 'em, (unless they're marble drum head clocks) same with Napoleon hat ones .But they were the last proper clocks (IMO) .Pick them up for peanuts and sit on them like the guy with the Beetle..
In the 70's you could pull school/ railway clocks out of every skip down the high street..no one wanted them..now 700quid upwards.. ANY wind up clock in the charity shop or flea market is worth having..and those Smith electrics .And it doesn't matter if they don't go ..fixing is easy enough.Careful with the mainspring mind

[JPB]

Easy enough if the O/C - one of the very few faults they seem to throw up - is caused by a break that's close to an end of the field coil. There's enough very fine wire on there to travel forty times up and down a tennis court! At least that was what it felt like last time I rewound a broken one.
I have a line winder so it only took me around three days. My Genalex, which is the same age and uses the same cabinet as the Bakelite Sectric, has so little attraction left that it's totally random in its starting habit. By that I mean that it sometimes runs backwards. I keep meaning to rearrange its separate brass numerals backwards round the face to go with it.

[Grumpy Northener]

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Our ex GPO (King George crested) impulse clock - 580mm diamiter- purchased from a Bonhams auction about 10 years ago by the other half for I think £60 at the time - I have removed the impulse mechanism but retained it and replaced it with a simple battery powered mechanism which keeps good time and drives the original hands - I also stripped the chipped dark varnish off the mahogany surround and treated it with a good bees wax polish - we would not live without it - it has pride of place in the hall just above the desk (well for now anyway as we just sold our property today - now on the hunt for a two + bedroom country cottage with the potential of multiple garaging in the grounds)

[zipgun]

My cousin had a dockyard apprentiship so was pretty good a metalwork. Walking home up Chatham high street, he'd pull all these old fusee clocks out of skips,take them to work next day, (don't think they did any "work" it was all Union controlled)Get thick sheet brass from the stores ,measure and drill all the pivot points and cut fancy frames. Remember ..dockyard taught.. no file marks..had to be perfect...not a blemish.. so then..
Swap the fusee guts into the new frames , then down the junk shop and buy a victorian stuffed bird in a glass dome..chuck the bird, coz you only want the old rippled glass bit ,and there you have ...a valuable.. "antique" skeleton clock ..
And it didn't matter if you got it wrong and it didn't go ..no one expects an antique 150 year old clock to work anyway. !!!
So , then to the antique auctioneers...every week ! And this carried on for quite a while, until the auctioneer became suspicious... 'Ere 'Arry.. where you getting all these skeleton clocks from lad?? And he got rumbled !

Bit like Escort Mexico's today !!

[kevin]

Id love an old clock for my workshop but the prices are always stupid when i see them for sale, also want an old radio just to sit on the shelf and look retro! ..sad or what

Kev

[zipgun]

No point in a new topic .. I had a EL3302 for xmas in '71 , cost Dad 22 quid which was a lot ! I loved that thing , played it non stop , recorded top 40 every Sunday ..no one else had one at my age..Alas, i eventually wore it out and it was thrown away (beginings of our throwaway society?? ) The replacement "Philips Hipster" was rubbish compared to my old one.

So look what i just bought ! top banana ! £15 but no warranty , belts hard i think !





rl]

[JPB]

Could be belts, could just as likely be a tyre problem. Do these use a capstan sleeve? I bought some R/C fuel line in pink silicon to replicate the capstan sleeves on my Sharps, that much less complex cassette recorder should be easier to get going:
The black goop is what was left of the original sleeves in the capstan bearing blocks from my big Sharp GF-555 -



Replacement identified:




And capstans rebuilt, you can just see their new pink sleeves in this image if you look closely at the area between the Oillite bushes in the blocks:



No need to use original, square section tyres on this silicon sleeving as it's much less likely to dissolve, so O-rings to the rescue, size chosen and one fitted as seen here on the idler of the recording deck from the 555:



And the beast finished and once again with both searching and recording decks fully functional for the first time since 1988 when the first capstan sleeve started to melt:
http://youtu.be/ep5LVYlrp3Q