How to: Antique Cuckoo Clocks

Hey, how you doing? I'm David Boyd from Boyd Clocks in Tampa and I'm going to show you how to correct an antique 30-hour cuckoo clock if the strike gets off. And I'll talk about a couple other things with this clock too. Anyway, this clock is from I would say 1900 to 1920. 30 hour, you have to pull the weights up once a day. I suggest putting the clock near the kitchen or a place that you are frequently going by in the house. I'm going to make sure the strike is doing correctly and then I'm going to mess it up and I'm going to show you how to correct it. I'm going to count this. It should be nine. Okay, that was nine. Now this time I'm just going to race on by and I'm going to mess the strike up. So right now it's going to be in the middle of doing 10. Straighten that hand just a little bit. Let's say I just came back from a trip and I don't even know what time it's striking. So I'm going to come down. See what it does in a half hour. Okay, once. Okay, it's 11. Now there's two or three ways of doing this. I'll show you two of them right now. This is the way my dad would have wanted me to show you. You come up just before the hour or the half hour and you're going to hear a little sound called the warning. You know, I think I heard it but it was so quiet. I'm going to come on through. Oh okay, it was this one's really quiet. Once you hear the warning you go backwards and it will advance. Okay, let me explain advancing. This has what's called a count wheel. In other words, it just struck 12. I don't care what you do with the hands. The next thing it's going to strike is 12.30 and then it'll strike one and then 1.30 and two and so on so forth. So I'm going to come up here. It just did 12. That is a quiet warning. So now it's going to do 12.30. Now it's going to do one and I can't, you can't go all the way up to the hour. If you make it all the way up to the hour it strikes, you cannot go backwards at that point. You go just to where it warns and there's a little noise. That is quiet. I don't know if I've ever heard one that quiet. Now let's see. I forgot where we left off. I think it's going to do 1.30 now. Okay, now since it's going to be correct, I'm going to go on up to the hour and let it strike two. Now the clock is correct and let's say it's one o'clock right now. Instead of going through the whole thing, you know, 11 hours to bring it back to one o'clock, I'm just going to stop the pendulum and let the time catch up to it. Even if I forget and I come back and it's 2.30, I can start the clock and just go to 2.30 without having to sit here and go through 11 hours of cuckooing. Now another way of doing this, I'm going to mess this up again. Okay, let's say I just got back from a trip. The clock had run down. Okay, I know that's probably the half hour. Okay, that was four and it's at six. Now my dad wouldn't want me to show you this way, but it's so easy. I'm going to make sure the hand doesn't come out, but I'm just going to point it to the four. I'm done, you know. And when I say come out, the hour hand is on a tapered shaft and it gets loose. See, now it's just hanging. So sometimes if your cuckoo clock has, you know, the hour hand is just hanging there, it's on a tapered shaft, so it just frictions on. You just push it on. So I'm going to put my thumb on the hub. I'm going to kind of twist it back and forth as I get it back down on the hub, and I'm going to keep pushing as I go back and forth so it gets tight, and then I'll put it on the four, which is where the clock left off. Now Galileo in 1602 wrote in his notes that he was watching the chandeliers swing in one of the cathedrals, and the longer chandeliers took longer to swing back and forth than the short ones. Let's see how you do that. I've practiced that. So okay, the one on the top is swinging faster than the one on the bottom. More importantly, he said that the chandeliers that were the same length, whether it was swinging a lot or just a little, was the same rate. And then he wrote in his notes that he thought that would make for good timekeeping. All that being said, think of an old grandfather clock. You know that the pendulum is moving really slowly, or a cuckoo clock, the pendulum is moving really quickly. It's all because of the length of the pendulum, not because it's made of a leaf or brass or any of that stuff. It's the length of the pendulum that determines timekeeping. So many cuckoo clocks have a little friction, a little place of friction. In other words, it's just pinched on there, and you can slide it up and down. If you slide it down, it'll run a little slower. Slide it up a little faster. And if it's like five minutes a day, you're going to want to slide it up quite a bit. And if it's just a little bit, just barely move it. I'm going to try to put it right back where it was because I think this is keeping a nice time, but we need to time this out. We just get it up and running. I'm going to put the pendulum back on. Also, clocks like to have a nice even tick, tick, tock, tick, tock, an even heartbeat, if you will. If a clock's going like tick, tock, tick, tock, or tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, kind of an irregular heartbeat, it's not going to want to keep running. Or if it is running, it's barely running. And you can change the beat a little bit just by shifting the clock on the wall. So what you're looking for is a nice even rhythmic tick, tock, tick, tock. And the clock may be out of level a little tiny bit, but if it runs nice, it may not be enough to notice. Anyway, that covers a few things on your cuckoo clock. Thank you very much.