Antique Clock Restoration - The Complete Job - Part 4, Pivot Polishing and Fusee Spacers.

Hi and welcome back. This is part 4 of the restoration series on the antique bracket clock. If you've missed any of the previous episodes, then check out the playlist. And subscribe so that you don't miss any future episodes. In this episode I'm covering the pivot polishing of the fuses primarily. As well as a few other little bits and pieces that we'll come to later. The pivots on the fuse are very important. And as covered in the last episode, the pivots on the barrels are also very important. Because at the bottom end of the train, any losses that are made due to poor condition of pivots and bearings is exacerbated later on in the train. So it's important to get the bottom end right. I start off by dressing the worn bearing surfaces with a pivot file. Here I'm using a micrometer but I'm not actually measuring the diameter believe it or not. I'm using the anvils of the micrometer to check the pivot for parallel. And make sure that it is square. Once the surface is essentially grey. It's a nice uniform satin finish off the file with no deep grooves. I can then move on to applying the burnisher. This is a dressed flat steel burnisher used with oil. You can apply a pressure and this improves the surface. It sort of refines the surface and creates a polished finish. It's not just a polished finish though, it's actually also a hard finish. It's an excellent bearing surface. So there is a difference between a burnished surface and just a polished surface that you've brought up using paper or buff sticks or something. The burnishing is an important process. The process is repeated on the other end of the fusie. As you can see in this clip I've dressed the square on one of the fusies and I'm now dressing the other one. When using an ill-fitting key it rounds the corners of the square. So sometimes it is necessary to re-square the winding arbour. Moving on to polishing the pivots on other train wheels. This is done in essentially the same way. Here I'm using a support in the poultry lane. As you can see in this clip the support is actually moving which is not good. I didn't notice this at the time, it's only while editing this video that I noticed that it was moving. So I got lucky with that because I didn't damage the arbour that I could have done. This is another method of pivot polishing which is a roll-mount machine. As you can see that uses a carbide wheel to dress the surface of the pivot. It's especially useful on things like the pallet arbour where you can't really have the crutch flying around in the lane. So as long as it clears the roll-mount it's a useful tool to use. In this instance I had to remove the crutch because it couldn't clear the roll-mount. Also the rivet was loose so it needed a dressing anyway. So I made the decision to knock the crutch off and to tidy up the pivot. This pivot was particularly worn so I had to bring it into shape with a pivot file first. Before taking it to the burnisher and then the roll-mount just to finish it off. The roll-mount is a fantastic tool for finishing pivots and for working small pivots but it can't remove a lot of material. So it's best to get the pivot as near as possible traditionally before just finishing off on the roll-mount for a nice finish. The collet to mount the crutch onto the pallet arbour needed turning back a little bit to give space for a better rivet. So this was done by mounting it up in the cultural lathe and then just turning it back as you can see me doing here with a hand graver. Only a small amount of material needed removing but this was just to give that little bit more material to do a decent rivet. And hold the crutch on properly. You can see that extra little bit of material that's now available to peen over and rivet the crutch on. I always take a train count when I'm restoring a clock. This means that I can calculate the beats per hour that the clock should be doing which is essential for timing the clock later on. It gives you the data of what the clock is supposed to be doing. The calculation is actually the wheels times together times by two because the escape wheel acts on both sides of the pallets over the pinions times together. And that will give you the beats per hour. With this being a pinwheel escapement it was in knocked around condition so it needed quite a bit of straightening up. To straighten all the individual pins. Rather than bore you watching this in real time I've sped this up and I'll leave you with a little bark. So now that the pivots are polished it's time to look at the little pairs that need making. In this instance the great wheels were really very sloppy on the fuses. You can see that the latch plate or cover plate or whatever you want to call it is not supporting the great wheel and you can see it flapping around. The clock would run like this but it's doing two things. One the ratchet inside the fuse is potentially not engaging as deeply as you would like. And two it can affect the mesh between this and the next pinion which can in turn wear the teeth on the great wheel. So I always like to improve this slop, take this wear out. And this is one method of doing that. What I did was to start by just facing off the surface of the cover plate so that it's a nice flat datum surface. And then refitting it to the fuse with the pin in place. I can then use a feeler gauge and measure the distance, the amount of movement there is between the pin and the top of that cover plate. And then it's a simple process to knock up a spacer to take up that play. It's a little bit trial and error, the spacer may need adjustments. But just dragging it across the surface of a stone or a piece of wet and dry paper means you can easily adjust this to be a really nice mechanical fit. Thank you very much for following along with this series and watching my videos. The next video in this series will be out in about a month's time. And if you would like it a week early be sure to check out my Patreon where you will be able to view all of my long format videos a week earlier than on YouTube. Thanks very much for watching, see you on the next episode.