Restoring An English Grandfather Clock From The 1800s

Hi, I'm Devin. Today I'm going to walk you through how I restore a 200-year-old grandfather clock. Clocks that old weren't branded with anything other than just the clockmaker's name. A single person built the entire thing. This particular one is Abraham Shaw of Billingborough. So, an English clock. My customer brought it from England to the U.S. She inherited this from her parents, who inherited it from their parents, who inherited it from their parents, back to ballpark 1820s. Pre-restoration, this clock is probably not worth much. I'd say maybe $500 at most, probably less. The case definitely is in the need of more attention than the mechanism. The whole case has come apart. I like to start with the cleaning, just to make sure there's not going to be any kind of dust or debris with all clock spider webs. It's going to be in the way of, you know, re-gluing everything. The next step after I clean it is start approaching some of the wood repairs. I almost never have to fix a case this bad of tradition. This case was in serious need of help. The parts of a clock case, the names of them vary. Each country would call them different things, but typically for an English clock, you would have the bonnet, which is the basically just slides off. It has the front door to it, and then typically some type of decoration to make the clock look nice. Then you have the trunk, which is just the main body of the clock, where you have a door. You can see the pendulum and the weights. The base of the clock is the bottom, the bottom square section. The floor of the clock was broken and half of it missing, so I just do a couple quick measurements on the inside and cut out a new piece. This is the most common broken thing on grandfather clocks. If there's some type of failure from the weights, the weights come crashing down, and when you get a 200 year old clock, chances are it's missing the bottom. So I attach the floor to the to the base by using glue and nails, and then the nails just help the glue dry properly. The top right trim piece of the hood is often in very bad condition. I was left with decisions to make there, and I just decided to keep the original piece. It was a little difficult to tell what was actually the cause of that top corner, but my best guess and a few other clockmakers I gave me an idea was most likely bugs of some sort, and that it rotted from there. The first thing I needed to do was copy its profile. There was no good place to copy it on this piece because it was damaged pretty much all over, so I just went to the back edge of the other side and just used a piece of paper and a pencil, and I just get the profile for that piece. Then I glue that to another piece of wood to cut that shape out, and that piece of wood is what we will end up calling a form tool. Then I use a combination of Bondo wood filler and paint just to just to get it close to the right color initially, and of course this clock would have been stained originally, so to try to match that look I just used a combination of brown, red, and black paint to to mimic the the wood grain as best I could. I mix that up with the hardener and apply it on in large copious amounts onto the piece and make sure it's all rubbed into all the nooks and crannies so it's going to make a good joint everywhere, and then I use that form tool that I made to basically wipe off the excess other than where I want it. I wouldn't call it fabrication, but I did have to, for lack of better terms, fabricate that piece. Then I cut it off to size so I give it a 45 degree angle on the front where it will meet the other piece, and then cut the back off just straight where it will be at the back of the clock, and then I glue it down. In this case I did not use wood glue because I used Bondo wood filler and I didn't want the wood filler to make it so the joint would not be strong, so I used a general purpose glue everything type of glue which I wouldn't use on something load-bearing, but this is just an ornate decorative piece on the side so that glue will be sufficient for that. Nine times out of ten wood glue is going to be your best option. There's a lot of odd shapes on on this so it's not easy to clamp. Clamps have to be opposite from each other and you don't always have that availability so I usually use weights or something like that in place. Easily the hardest part of this case, easily the hardest part, was the glass. That could have been glazed in place 200 years ago and then at some point during its life that glass broke so I'm left with a bunch of glazing that's full of glass shards all throughout it. So there's no great way to get that old glazing out. The method I use is just take a razor blade and scrape it out, you know, take your time going around the whole perimeter, clean up as you go to make sure none of the glass shards are going to hurt the piece of wood. Removing that previous glazing is is very tedious and can hurt you. And then I put the glass in and then I use a couple nails to to hold the glass in while I glaze it and that's it's straightforward but definitely requires a steady hand. In between you work on the mechanism so, you know, disassemble it. Disassembly takes a lot of focus. You have to make sure you're paying attention to where things are if you see any kind of previous repairs because previous repairs are usually a sign of disaster. A lot of beginner clockmakers or hobbyists are tempted to not disassemble the movement and dunk it straight into the ultrasonic cleaner thinking that it'll clean it, you know, it's in there. But you do need to take everything apart not as much for cleaning but more so for rinsing and drying afterwards. The solution will go in between the little tiny parts if they're still together and they won't, it won't come back out when you when you try to rinse it. You got to take the everything apart down to the very last screw, very last pin and clean it that way in the ultrasonic solution which needs to be clock cleaning solution. If it's just brass cleaning solution or something along those lines you can flash rust to steel or if you use steel cleaning solution you can actually corrode the brass. It sits there for ballpark 20 minutes. That solution stays on the parts for too long it will ruin them. So you have to very very thoroughly rinse it all off with water and then water is just as bad as the solution if you don't dry it off. If you get a little bit of water stays stuck in a corner it'll destroy the clock in a matter of a couple years. Now I'm gonna repair the mechanism. I start working on the pendulum. The pendulum was already in pieces when I received it. The bob of the pendulum, the brass circle at the bottom is actually how we determine how fast or slow our clock will run. So it needs to be able to slide up and down smoothly without any kind of snagging or getting stuck. So I had to remove a very small amount of material from the rod to make sure the bob could go up and down and then polish that surface to make sure it's as close to frictionless as possible. I actually found some witness marks on this particular clock. On the rod there were some lines scratched and I just went ahead and assumed that that's where they wanted the pendulum bob set to. So I went ahead and set it right there and put the screw on underneath it and it actually worked first try. Next I am polishing the pivots. I'm not focusing on the gear. I'm actually focusing on the arbors for the gears. At the end of each arbor there is a pivot point that it will turn inside the plates. It's axle basically. Clock parts have a lot of terminology that don't match up with today. Gears are not called gears, they're called wheels. Axles are not called axles, they're called arbors. I use the lathe which is convenient because it turns everything concentrically. It makes everything a lot easier and turns out nicer in the end. A lathe is actively trying to kill you at all times. If you touch it, it will not stop. So I keep my fingers out of the way by using paper and then if I have enough room I actually use very fine abrasive stones like an Arkansas stone which is just very fine, fine grit. We're talking around like 4,000 grit. If you leave jagged edges, it doesn't happen overnight, but over the course of a few years the clock will actually eat itself away if it's not smooth surfaces. The other end of them is their bearings inside the plates. The little holes in the plates, those need the same process. They need to be cleaned very thoroughly and then you know made sure that they're polished properly where it'll have very little friction. The escapement pallet is going to be one of the most ignored things in a clock but arguably the most important. This is what the pendulum is attached to at the very top. That groove, that's a fraction of the thickness of a human hair. It's really, really small. The escape wheel has been hitting that over and over again for many, many years. The clock will not run accurately if those grooves are there. Most people when they repair clocks will ignore this but I go ahead and repolish those surfaces. We're putting in brass cable. When I picked it up it already had brass wire but originally it would have had catgut cable which would have been made out of catguts. That's exactly what it sounds like. We use brass instead of steel because steel cable will actually tear up the parts inside the clock but brass is what the parts are made out of so it's hard to tear up brass with brass. You want this to wrap around the barrel that it's going onto the correct amount of times and you also want it to have the weights reach the bottom of the case in eight days. This is an eight-day movement. There's a few things you got to be careful of when assembling the mechanism so the obvious one of make sure everything's in the right place but that's actually a lot less like a puzzle than you think. If you know what each part does it only has one place to go and then the difficult part is indexing it where you don't just put it in the right spot but it needs to be oriented correctly when it goes there so you need to have one part of a gear meshing with another part of the gear. All those pivots that we polished are very fragile so when you are putting plates together you have to be very careful and use very small amounts of force to try to nudge everything into its place and make sure that the pivots go into the correct holes and aren't damaged. That's definitely the art of fixing the clock is trying to close the plates. It takes a certain feel. Once it's together then you get it up on the test stand and make sure it's still working right and then there's actually a several week period of testing. Every time I come into the shop I see if it's running fast or slow and make an adjustment. Usually when I test it there I like to get it to where everything is working completely properly for a whole week straight then I put it into the case to test it there to make sure it's all going to continue to work properly. Time at the workbench I spent probably around two weeks or so actually working on stuff you know it's and that's I'm talking full hours of two weeks. I'm pretty happy with this restoration definitely the movement the movement was you know everything went according to plan how I liked. The most satisfying part of this restoration and and every restoration is is definitely going to be one of two things either either the first time the clock ticks you know when I set it up in it and it works that's that's extremely satisfying to have that happen and the other part is is the client when I deliver it back it's extremely satisfying to see these people's reactions you know. Sometimes for clocks that are chiming clocks I'll bring it back and they haven't heard it chime since they were eight years old in their grandparents house. You're only the temporary caretaker of this clock. It's been around for 200 years you know it's going to outlive you so it's more important to to do what is right for the clock. I try to keep it original as much as I possibly can at all times.