How To Set Up An Antique Longcase Clock - Dials Antique Clocks.

Hi, I'm Martin Fairhurst from Dahl's Antique Clocks. I'm here today in my showroom in Livington and I'm going to show you how to set up a long case clock. So if we head over this way you've got the movement and dial from a Scottish clock over case. As you see there's the actual basis of the case and I'm now going to put this movement dial on top of the clock. So we just place it like this and put it onto the shoulders of the clock making it look sort of central so it seems to all line up and there we go. That looks probably just about good enough there. So we do that and then we get the pendulum. Now this is probably one of the slightly more difficult bits but we basically have to open the door of the clock, feed the pendulum into the clock and bring it up to the back of the clock. I've put the pendulum inside the clock now and I'm just feeding it up through the back. Now this is always quite tricky doing this but it has to actually go, I don't know if you can see this, the suspension here has to feed through what we, the actual name is the crutch here, has to go through the centre of the crutch and be fed up through. I'm holding it obviously, this is a two-handed job so you're feeding it up and at the top there's a brass holder and we literally feed, that just sits on there. What we have to be very careful of is, you can see the barrels of the clock here, that the line isn't tangled up, you really don't want the line either dropping over the top or over the front of the barrel. So you can see here it's sitting perfectly on the barrel and this is exactly what you want to see. Now what we're going to do is put the actual weights on the pulley. So when you look at the front of the clock what you find is the pulley tends to rest like so and what we want is the pulley to turn up like that onto the line. So that's the kind of action you want. Then we're put the weight onto the pulley and that just literally goes like that. So it's really really easy but you must have the pulley on the line etc. Do the same with this one on this side, turning the pulley over, hooking the weight on. And the next thing to do is to make sure that the clock is going to tick evenly. We've got the weights on the clock, the next thing to do is to start the clock up and get the pendulum moving. This we do by just giving it a little flick like that and the most important thing of setting a clock up is getting a really even tick. It's got to be like a metronome, it's got to be even on both sides. If it's got a jumping sound it'll never work, it may go for a bit but it's going to stop and so many people get this wrong when they're moving or setting a clock up they may move it out and put it back into the spot again. If you haven't got a really even sound the clock will stop, a very common problem. So there we are, the clock's ticking evenly and that sounds very nice indeed. So I'm closing the door and now I'm going to put the top back on just sliding it back like that. It looks all nice and even and that clock's going to work absolutely fine.