Found A Very OLD English Dial Clock - Never Had A Fusee!

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Amateur Repair Time. Today is Sunday and this morning, first thing, I got a text from a friend of mine who goes to the flea market all the time, this older gentleman, and he knows that I like clocks and radios so he sent me a picture of a clock that he saw at the flea market. He's always there, a different one than me and earlier than basically wanted to know if I was interested in it. So I said, I don't know. Let me show you the picture that he sent me and you can see what I saw. Now, I'm looking at this and I was actually driving at the time so I could just take a quick glance at it. I couldn't look at it too close. To me, it looked small. It looked like maybe like this Jefferson mystery clock here, something about that size. This one here, we did a little steeple clock or whatever it's called. I thought it was something like that, like a little desk clock. I typically collect American clocks just because I know there's so many different clocks. I don't want to collect all of them so I just kind of specialize a little bit in American stuff. I looked at it and I thought it was a desk clock and I've got a whole ton of stuff like that. I didn't think there was anything all that special about it. It looked nice enough but I thought it was about six inches tall. So I sent him back. I said, I'd pay $15 for it and I thought it was just a little wind-up clock. Well, I didn't hear anything back from him and as luck would have it that day, I actually ended up going to that same flea market. So my friend actually was set up at the flea market selling stuff and on his table was that clock. So he had bought it anyway and he said, Ronnie, they wouldn't sell it to me for $15 but I went ahead and got it anyway. I figured I'd resell it because I thought it was worth more than that because the carving is so nice on it. It's all, I think he said, I can't remember what he called it but he knew what the carving was and what the wood was and everything. I was like, okay. He said, I paid the guy $20 for it and I thought, okay. I'm sitting there looking at it at that point and I realized that I had kind of made a little mistake. So I said, well, what would you take for it? He's like, well, if you give me $25, that'll work. And I said, okay. So I bought it for $25. So you saw the picture and like I said, I thought it was about six inches tall. This is what was actually sitting on his table when I got there. This thing's more like 20 inches tall. And here's the pendulum that was sitting beside it. This is like a two pound pendulum or something like that. I mean, this is heavy, really heavy. So once I saw it, you know, my opinion changed. I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute. This is not what I thought it was. So we're going to take this apart in this video and figure out what in the world it is. So I took a quick little look at it and this will be hanging under it. Now, I don't know that you'll see it. We'll have to figure it all out. I don't know that it hangs low enough that you'll see it under the cabinet or even that it's the right one, I assume it is. But I can't remember what they call these where the pendulum is outside of the case. Right. And look at the, look at the wood. This is why he bought it because of how the wood is. Just look how well carved all that is. And it's solid wood. It's not, it doesn't have a laminate on it or anything like that. And then look at the dial. The glass is all yellowed. I don't know if that's just nicotine or I don't know that glass gets yellow when it gets old, but maybe it does, but it's all yellowed. It might clean up. And there is no marking on the dial that I can see. There's the wind hole. There's just one, which means it's just a time movement. It's not a, it's not a time and strike movement. So obviously whenever I saw this, I thought, well, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. That's pretty nice quality stuff. And then this is what did it for me. I don't know if you'll be able to see it. Oh, and by the way, this thing is really heavy. It's about 15 pounds, which is quite heavy for a wall clock in my opinion. Um, let's look in there. See if you see what I see. Yeah. So see that cone-ish looking thing in the middle with a chain around it? This is a Fusee clock. So as I understand it, when they first made spring clocks, and this is way back 1400s or something like that, when they first made spring clocks, they had a problem that they ran into. When you wind the spring, it's under a lot of force. And so when it unwinds, it doesn't want to be in that position. So as it unwinds at first, it's really strong. So, uh, I think before the pendulum regulated it, you know, basically a pendulum will swing it back and forth, regulates the clock and has it running at a certain time. Um, but the way it originally, the problem that they ran into was when that spring is really tight and newly wound, it runs faster. And then as the spring relaxes, maybe last seven days or whatever, as the spring relaxes, it's not as strong and it runs slower. So they weren't super accurate. So they invented the Fusee movement, which is a cone-ish thing with a chain around it. So what happens is when it's really tightly wound, it unwinds from, I don't know, maybe the bottom of the cone. And then as it, as it relaxes, that chain has moved up to where it's unwinding from a smaller diameter part of the cone, or it may be vice versa, whatever makes it work. Um, and it, uh, it, it is a way that regulates the time to make it more consistent. So these Fusee clocks are really kind of, most of them are very old and they're, they're, it's really kind of a unique, uh, repair of, uh, how the, of that little issue. A lot of pocket watches actually had that, which made them really thick because they had to have that cone-ish barrel in there. Right. So anyway, that's my understanding of it. So, uh, I don't have anything that's Fusee. I might have one or two pocket watches that I've never worked on or something that are that, but I don't have any clocks that are like that. And I liked that this one swings under the, the, uh, clock. Although again, you may not be able to see it. Most of them, the pendulum is inside the clock. It could be that something's missing off the bottom of this, but I don't think so. It doesn't really look like it is kind of cut up here. Um, oh, you know what? It may not hang out because look, there's, it almost looks like there were hinges there. So there could have been a door there at one point. So this may mount up in there far enough that it doesn't actually hang out of the case. We'll see. Um, so what is, it's my clock stop. I knew I needed to wind it. Um, so what is this? Well, I'm going to before, I don't know a maker or anything. There is a door on the side over here. I looked in it and couldn't see anything. Uh, I mean, I could see the movement, but I couldn't tell what it was. I'm just going to guess because there's no markings and because of the way the case looks. Um, let me just show you the side and the back too. That is like a veneer, I think. Is that a piece of the veneer breaking off? And then here's the back of the clock. Um, and here's the hook for the wall, which passed to be significant because like I said, it weighs like 15 pounds. Okay. And just the way that it's constructed, I'm going to guess this is really old. Um, you can see the finish there is a little uneven, so I don't know. And the way this is just screwed together, I don't know about that either. Um, just the look of the glass and the fact that it's a Fusee and the look of the pendulum, I'm going to guess really old. So I'm going to guess that it's British. I'm going to guess that it's like a, um, just a random maker, somebody I've never heard of, like a, kind of a, you know, a smaller, uh, clockmaker. It's British and it's from about 1870. That's my guess. Now that's not too, that may sound like a really crazy old date if you're an American, you know, to us, a hundred years is a long time, but in Europe, a hundred years is not that long of a time. So like for instance, I got all kinds of stuff in here that's old. That's probably from the 1970s. This clock is probably from the 1920s, maybe a little older. That was probably from the 1950s. Um, this one here, I think is from about 1890 or something. We did a video and I can't remember the exact time, but that's probably late 1800s. They're not really that expensive. So you can find tons of clocks from 1860, 1870, 1880 that really aren't worth a ton of money. So, um, like I said, I bought this one for 25 bucks. I'm going to assume it's British Fusey movement. I'm going to say it's 1870 or so. That's my guess. So we'll see when we take it apart and see if we can figure it out. Um, the face kind of makes me think that too. We'll look at that here in a minute. Um, I don't know if I've got anything else in here really. Well, the, you know, the radios are kind of old. These are from like the 19, this is probably 1920s, maybe 1930. Um, this is definitely 1930s. Um, and the, the phonographs are from the 1920s. So, you know, I'm just saying this is, I think maybe 50 years older than that. A lot of this stuff's a hundred years old. So, okay. So let me open up the face here, the glass, so you can get a look at the face and then tell me what you think. Gotta be careful. See the yellowed, I'm hoping that will clean off, but if it doesn't, we'll just leave it. Okay. So the dial is painted, right? So I think she's old. It could be that there was a marking on it that's came off or something. I'm not going to do anything to the dial. I don't even know that I'll clean it. You know, I'm just going to leave it how it is. What do you think? Am I crazy with my 1870 guess? Okay. So I'm going to take these hands off by removing this pin with a pair of pliers or something. Oh no, there we go. So I got the pin out and there's a little washer here and another little washer was under that minute hand. Beautiful. And then the hour hand usually is pressed on a little bit thicker. So we're getting a little movement. Sometimes you can take the face off and leave the hour hand on because it attaches to a gear that's on the front of the clock and it just, wherever you put the hand back on, it'll go back in place. But yeah, that might not have, we might've took the insert out of that by doing that. Yeah. Well, that actually didn't remove the whole hand. I don't think. Okay. So I'm going to get a screwdriver and take these little screws out and then we'll see what's underneath it. Okay. So I took the four screws out and you can get a better look at the finish of the dial here. I think this is old, old people. We'll find out shortly. You can see that the hand coming off did do what it should. Wow. The freaking dial is heavy too. Okay. So the movement is attached to the dial. That's why it's so heavy. And the dial is very thick. So let me carefully move the dial, move this out and put the case down on the ground. Here's the case. See a couple of screw holes in the back so that you can screw it to the wall. No more markings inside of it. I don't know. The finish is so nice. It's either been refinished or maybe it's newer than I think. Maybe it's from the twenties or thirties or something. Okay. So I'll put this on the ground and we'll look at the movement. You can see just how thick this face is. And actually has mounting bosses on the back of the dial. Wow. Okay. So let me pull the pins out of those so we can take the face off so that we can look at the movement better. Okay. So there were three posts through the front of the, of the plates and then underneath it, it says Kilble. K-I-L-B-L-E. Kilble. There's a little brass escutcheon, I'll call it, around the winding hole so that when the key goes through, it doesn't wear it, I guess. You know, I have no reason to not think that that's original and I don't see any other markings on it other than that, but maybe we can figure out something from that. So here's the back of the movement. I was able to see a little bit of this from inside. There's a piece of tape on it where I assume maybe at one point someone had taped this to it. I believe the way this would hang would be with this through there, through the crutch there. And then obviously the suspension spring has broken, right? So I think that's what we're looking at. This is bent probably because when this fell off, it probably gave all kinds of problems. Like I said, this weighs like a couple pounds. So there's a piece of tape on there. I would like to remove that. I'm gonna go ahead and get rid of that and then we'll look at the front. I have not looked at the front yet because the last little bit never comes off, does it? Let's let the light hit it. Yeah, this is old. Look at the... so is that brass? And look at the discoloring of it where you know where it's got some kind of something mixed into it, I guess. I don't know. So there's the barrel. Look at that. And it's fully unwound, I would suppose, because if it was wound it would be inside that barrel, right? Very simple clock, actually. It's really well built, but there ain't a lot to it. Beautiful fork. Look at the screws on it to hold the... what would you call that? The verge? Beautifully constructed. Nothing looks damaged. It may have been unwound and the the pendulum suspension spring had broken and that was the whole problem. Okay, so let's see if there's any kind of mark. I do not see one. I don't see anything. You know, the pins in the plates... I hope I see something there. The pins in the plates, they stopped doing like 1880 or so, I think, on the American movements. If you're looking at like Seth Thomas, for instance, looks like that may have been something carved in there at one point. And then is that something there or is that... I think it's just a just damage. I don't think it actually says anything. Okay, so I have no clue what we have here. I don't know who made it. I thought it was killable. Okay, well, I'll leave it like this because I don't want to break this I've got a German... that clock you just heard in the hallway is a German Junghans from 1931, I think, or 1929, something like that. And it's... there's a few things similar. I don't think it used the pins to hold the plates together and it wasn't a fusie, but it just the bulkiness of it, how well it's made, and like the nice escape wheel with the, you know, the freaking crazy verge there. So it's possible it's German, but for whatever reason, I think it's English. Okay, so let me see if I can figure it out by maybe doing an image search or something or just looking and see what I can find. Okay, so I've done a bunch of research and it looks like they're called English dial clocks, also English pub clocks, English schoolhouse clocks, English drop dial clocks, all kinds of stuff, but English dial clocks look the most common. And, you know, they go way back. You can't really tell a year on most of them. There is a book where a guy kind of breaks down how to kind of decipher it just on features of the movements, but it's kind of how I assumed it's, you can't really tell who the manufacturer was because there were tons of clockmakers making the same types of movements and you can't completely date it. And they said the case is almost impossible to tell who made the case. Apparently there were tons of people making the cases, but most of them were made in England. And I did find several that had the kind of fancy surround similar to ours. Here's one that's, you know, a similar kind of thing. Looks like it's the same type of wood, maybe mahogany or something. Here's another one. This is a good example here. This is very similar to the one we have. Usually they would have a name or something painted on the dial, but that name could be either the person that made it or the place that it was mounted. It's just how they did it. Most of them are from the 1800s. Here's another one. This one's been restored and everything. And the price is, you can't, you know, I don't have any clocks that are worth a bunch of money. So I do not have any kind of illusions that this one is made worth $1,200 or anything like that. But I'm just, this is, you know, a similar carved style. Here's a gentleman that had one that was kind of plain and he was just asking questions about it and he got some good information here. So these are, this is on the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors. Just talking about these dial, these English dial clocks. This guy says, and he's talking about this gentleman's clock up above, which doesn't have the fancy kind of surround. Ours does. It's just a regular one. He says, dating this could be difficult because these were produced over quite a long period, but a rough guess would be the second half of the 19th century for the one that this gentleman's showing. This guy says, the shape of the plates with the shaped shoulders and cutout bottom edge shows up as early as 1830. The pillars, if they're straight as they appear and not taper towards the ends, are found between about 1790 and 1845. The cross section of the bezel appears to be that found between 1830 and 1870. I couldn't really tell about the cross section of the wooden dial surround with that shape. The hand design on the single dot minute markers might indicate an earlier date. So there are ways to decipher it. One gentleman wrote a book where he kind of breaks all that down. This guy says, very nice English dial clocks. I would estimate it to be around mid 19th century. They were also used in domestic settings, not just public places. Sadly with no markings, it is impossible to say where it was made. So ours has no markings. The drop shape you mentioned is normally called a teardrop. So the teardrop is the little winged, they look like angel's wings kind of on the bridge on the back. Dotted minutes are unusual. The dial looks original. You better have a look at it under UV light and see if you can spot anything. The hands are very nice and again, unusual, blah, blah, blah, blah. So this is, they're talking about this specific one. This guy's saying he believes that this particular one of the guys was repainted. Yours is a nice English fusing and all the probably would be one of the J&O walkers of Milton Street or Finchurch Street, London or Pots and Stuns or J.W. Benson or Ellett. So apparently there's some, you know, some English guys that can figure this crap out, but yeah, I don't know them. Okay. And then another one here or somewhere, I've got some more information. Here's one that's more fancy, you know, it's completely carved out and everything. It's pretty nice. That one he's saying is late 19th century. Here's the book. It's by a gentleman named Ronald Rose that basically he tells you things to look for on the movements to figure out ideas. This is what the suspension springs kind of look like. Some of them, at least that might be what we need to get ours, our pendulum back on. Okay. Here's a good one. So this guy asked some questions about it, about his, his is one of the carved kind of, you know, similar to ours. This one, his is probably a little more fancy, but similar to ours. The box is very similar to ours. Ours is even split in half like that in the back. The movement, similar to ours, a slightly different shape, but it does have the little angel wing bridge up here at the top. A little bit, I think they call those teardrops. Similar palette. Right. Okay. So this says, Rose suggests your pillars were in use till about 1845. Whenever I see clocks with these fancy surrounds, I always think of them as mid 19th century. So he's putting it 1840, 1850, 1860. The flat bottom, maybe because of the surround flat bottom cases were usually on older clocks, but the back box would have been made to go with the surround. Picks of the back box from other aspects may help. All right. That's about all that they ended up saying about that. Time savers has a ton of different suspension springs. And again, that, so I'm, you know, I said 1870, I still think, you know, I'm, I'm just obviously randomly guessing and I don't really have any way to prove it otherwise. The only other thing I saw that was important was they said that the reproduction ones, like the newer ones, you know, just trying to rule out that that thing is something that was made in 1970 or something. They said the reproduction ones usually had thinner plates and there's nothing thin about those plates. And just the construction of the plates, I would say it's original. And, and again, it's not a thing where, Oh, it's original. So it's worth a bunch of money. No, no, this one really is the $800. It's not like that. You know, it might be worth a couple hundred bucks, maybe, but probably not any more than that. And that's, you know, not crazy money. So a reproduction, my dad bought a bunch of reproduction ones in the nineties. And at the time they were about a hundred dollars for like little parlor clocks and stuff. So, you know, the, the originals weren't really worth more than the reproductions in a lot of instances, you know, parlor clocks and rooster, rooster head box and all of that, whatever you want to call them, gingerbread box. A lot of those are selling for a hundred bucks and the new ones were a hundred bucks. So, anyway, that's okay. So the suspension spring would have mounted about right there. If you look inside of this pendulum, there is a wear mark where it looks like it was sitting about right there over and over again. Okay. And if I put it there, if I measure between that pin in the spring and then the little indention for the pin above the spring, I mean, above the bridge there, it's two centimeters. So I need a suspension spring that has a brass plate on the bottom. So it's sandwiched in the spring comes out of it. And then on the top has a pin up there. And this just needs a hole that I can put a pin through. They have just used a tapered pin and knocked it over. I'm going to take that out so we can look at it. Okay. So it's, it's one centimeter wide and the hole is one millimeter and it had a single spring in it, not a double one. Sometimes they're made where there's one here and one here and it's, it's empty in the middle, but the original one, it looks like if this is the original one, looked like it was one flat piece. Okay. And there's the teardrop things. To me, they look like angel's wings, what I would call it, but I can see where they're saying it's teardrop too. So usually I take these all apart, clean everything and then put them all back together. I don't think I'm going to do that on this one because I, you know, I haven't messed with these much and there's a, you have to set a tension on that cable. And since this is the first one I've screwed with, I don't think I want to mess with that. I think I just want to clean it up. These are tapered by the way, those little, the posts, they're a little smaller on the top than the bottom. Um, yes, I don't really want to take the, this apart. There's like a click spring inside of it, I think on the end or something. I don't really want to mess with that because I don't, I don't know what I'm doing here and it's such a simple movement. I think I'm just going to clean it the best I can and then reoil it. Um, there's just a few pivots to even worry about. Um, it's, it's not like this is going to be one that I'm running every day anyway. Um, so that's my plan. We'll clean it up and oil it. I usually run the plates and everything through an ultrasonic cleaner too, but you know, I don't really want this to look brand new or anything. Whenever I get it out of the cleaner, the brass always looks new pretty much, which is fine on a lot of them, but I think I'm just going to leave this one original. So let me get, let me see if I've got, I may have a suspension spring here that'll fit that. If I don't, I'll order some and I'll order some of those other Fusee, Fusee springs that they talk about online just in case that's wrong. But, um, the other thing is how much play have I gotten? Yeah, see I can, hmm, if I were to put, so that, that one that says that it's for a Fusee is actually much longer. I think it's like four centimeters, um, which would mean that this would be hanging too low, but I've got about that much adjustment in it, which would more than make up for it. I'll see if I've got one that fits. If I do, we'll just use it. If I don't, I'll order several different ones and we'll figure it out. So those springs I'm seeing online are like five millimeters thick. This one is 10 millimeters thick or wide. Um, and if you look, that bridge is 10 millimeters wide and then the, the hole in it is one millimeter and, um, it's right in the center and it matches up with where that was. So I would imagine that the top probably looked very similar to the bottom, um, because of the width of it. I think it probably was 10 millimeter originally because that fits perfect in there. Um, yeah. Okay, I've got, so I've got one of those assortments of, uh, springs and I don't have the right size that's one centimeter wide, but I had the right size that's like half that, which isn't as important. You know, the, the drop is more important and the thickness is more important and we don't really know about the thickness, but that's basically dead on what we need. We'll sit in there like that. Perfect. Um, so the, the, it's exactly two centimeters. So exactly what we were looking for, kind of. Um, good enough for me. I'll look on time savers to see if they have something that's one centimeter wide and, um, you know, but for, for now I think we can just use it how we've got it. So one of the interesting things about this clock is there's very few pivots because it just, it's only time. So there's no strike, which makes it means it loses half of the, uh, uh, it loses half of the, the, the wheels. Right. So what I've done is cause I don't want to take it all apart. It would be fairly simple to take all apart, but I just don't feel like, uh, I don't know much about this one. And basically this is all wound up. I don't want to get into all that right now. Um, I'm trying to make this one kind of quick just so I can hang it on the wall and look at it. So what I've done is I took some, uh, rubbing alcohol and cleaned around these pivots just because the problem you run into is it'll have old oil and old dirt in there. Right. So I did that here. And this black that you're seeing is what came out of that, just cleaning that out. So it did have some dirt in it. Um, so I'm going to clean those carefully and clean on the other side. Of course that won't get what's on the other side of the pivots inside the plates, but I'm at least getting it out of the well here and then we'll put new oil in it. Okay. So I've got one of those little movement, uh, mounts. So basically you mount it on the plate and then there's a, I've got a screw attached to this big chunk of wood that I've got. And then you kind of turn it until you get it in You don't want to tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. You want it. And then we're just going to leave it a while and see if she keeps running. So I'll be back here in a little bit. It will not keep running. So we're going to have to take it apart to get it completely clean and to, uh, check all the pivots and everything and make sure we get it, uh, get it reliable. So that didn't work. I think the problem might be one, we don't know what's going on in the, I guess there's a spring in here. I think there's a spring in here. Um, and we don't know what's up with that. I tried turning the, uh, so basically you turn the, the, um, Arbor on the front, but it's attached to the, the fusee part. So I guess since that's attached to over here to this canister, that there is a spring inside the canister that you were winding up when you do that. But we don't know what kind of condition that spring is in. It may even be broken. I don't know. But I, so I assume that what's happening is there's a spring in there that is now trying to recoil, which will pull the chain off of the fusee, uh, cone and coil back up and, and uncoil the spring inside of this. Um, and that will allow it to be wound again. But basically the thing won't run more than about 10 minutes. So you get about 10 minutes out of it, but something's not quite right. So we take it all the way apart. That'll allow us to clean all of these bushings better to check them for slop, um, and to disassemble the spring canister and see what's going on inside of that. Like I said, if it, the way this works, you know, if you wind it up and you get that chain off onto the cone, well, if that spring was broke, it would basically work exactly like it's working. Um, I don't know how long it would run. We might, you might not get 10 minutes out of it. The spring was completely broke. But the other thing is if there's a bunch of gunked up grease or oil inside of that canister, it's just never going to uncoil right. So, um, we're going to have to completely disassemble the thing just to check it all out. So, but guess what? We'll do that on the next video. So I hope you enjoyed it so far. If you know anything about that particular type of clock, I don't believe there's any way to identify the year or the, or the maker. Um, and I looked for the name that's on the back of the dial and couldn't find any information at all about that. So what I, what I'm operating on now is that it's an English clock. Um, you know, I guess 1870, that might be right somewhere around through there. And that it was made by probably a small, um, clock make the clock shop that just made their own stuff and sold them. And they had a guy that was painting the dials and he signed the back of that down. And it's probably somebody that most people have never heard of, but if you've seen it or, you know, anything about it, let me know down below, but we'll be back next week, uh, where we'll completely disassemble the thing and then put it back in the case, hopefully get it running well again, and then put it back in the case and move on from there. So we'll see you on the next video.