Do to Parkinson's I no longer accept any work!

    This is a bigger problem than even most clock repair persons realize. It is imperative that a pendulum clock hangs on or sits on a stable platform. For a hundred years after the invention of the sextant navigators at sea could not determine longitude. In order to find the longitude sailors needed an accurate time piece. Pendulum clocks could not operate on a rocking ship and it was not until about 1761 that a time piece dubbed H4 by it's maker and inventor John Harrison, 1693 - 1776, made accurate time keeping possible on a rocking boat. The same principle was used in wind up wrist watches that can keep time on a moving wrist. Can you imagine trying to keep a pendulum time piece running on your arm? The same is true for pendulum clocks. They need a stable platform. We have seen clocks that we repaired come back because they kept stopping. We we found that they ran fine in the shop so we did some detective work and here are some of the things we found. One clock was set on a macrame hung from the ceiling where it was continually bumped by passerby's. Another clock was on a stable table but the floor under the table caused the table to move every time some one walked by. Another clock was stopping on a regular basis which coincidentally coincided with the trains which passed within a few feet of her trailer house. Several times we have solved the problem of grandfather clocks stopping for no apparent reason by putting a stable platform under the clock. If the clock sits on a deep pile carpet Newton's law comes into play. For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. This means that a grandfather clock sitting on a deep pile carpet tends to rock opposite the pendulums swing. Remember that Newton said equal reaction so that means as much as half the energy imparted to the pendulum to make it swing is instead being diverted to the entire clock to make it rock back and forth in opposition to the pendulum. Because the mass of the clock is many times greater than that of the pendulum the rocking of the clock is almost imperceptible but the energy loss is not trivial. So the moral of all this is to be certain you pendulum clock sits on a solid unmoving platform and make sure all the feet on the bottom of the clock solidly contact the base the clock sits on.                  

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