Clock used to run reliable, but no more
Hi Steve! First of all, thank you very much for these clocks! They are amazing!
I printed and assembled a SPB5 with the 15 day option. After a bit of tuning and reducing friction using your awesome debug hints I got it to work reliably. I went on vacation and even after a week it was still ticking just fine.
Then I decided to take off the weight shell (for an inspection) and put it back on. I didn't change anything else. Ever since then the clock is not running reliably anymore. It runs for a few hours at most, sometimes maybe just for a few minutes. The pendulum amplitude gets smaller and smaller till it completely stops. (I can restart it very easily though with just a gentle push of the pendulum)
Since then I tested the gears in isolation (without the pallet) and the weight (of ~6kg) drives the gears nicely. I can stop the escapement with my finger at any position and it nicely resumes spinning.
I also re-did the pendulum free swing test and I get about 12 mins of swinging before the amplitude gets too tiny. I assume this is fine too, right?
But when i put the two together, it doesn't run for long anymore. I am now playing around for a few days with a) alignment of the clock on the wall and b) the angle of the pallet against the escapement (by adjusting the two thumb screws); but even when the beat sounds even to me, I cannot seem to get it back to work reliably.
Do you have any tipps for me on what else I should check?
Many thanks in advance,
Andreas
Hi again,
Steve, thanks for your reply. For some reason it disappeared on the forum, but I tried your suggestions. Unfortunately they didn't help. Here is some more info from my side:
I added grease to the pinions, it didn't fix the clock. It is hard to say if it improves things, because the clock seems to sometimes run for a couple of minutes and sometimes for a couple of hours (even without greasing).
I have indeed a lot of weight. About 6kg. I tried with less weight as well, but it also didn't get me to a reliable clock unfortunately.
I recorded another video; this time hopefully with a better camera angle. The clock ran for about 3h this time. Here are the interesting timestamps:
Time stamp 1: The clock stops. It feels like the escapement has enough energy, but it somehow fails to give enough of an impulse to the pendulum to keep it going. But what do I know (:
Time stamp 2: The clock has stopped now for hours and I manually move the pendulum and also re-start it so you can observe the even-ness of the tick-tock
If you have any ideas of what I could debug next, I'd really appreciate it. It was so cool to have this amazing clock running reliably.