[T3] Why early clocks fail

[Jim Adney]

On 9 Aug 2011 at 13:40, Jeremy Menzies wrote:

> I never knew about the sitting battery causing that little wire to
> blow but that makes sense after seeing the mechanism in my clock
> (which is in my '71).  I was talking with a guy who used to have a
> Mercedes shop about it and he told me a trick they used to do for the
> same type of electrically wound mechanical clocks in the Mercedes.  He
> said to tap the negative terminal just a bit (to make a spark) and
> then fully push it down onto the post, instead of just putting it
> straight on.  Reason being that he'd seen it happen where the little
> clock 'fuse' would blow out when you reconnected it if you didn't
> release the energy through the spark. 

If the battery is charged, then I can't see how this would be any 
help. By the time you can touch the terminal and take it off, the 
impulse is done. If you tap it and hear it "clunk" you know that the 
winder is good and it's okay to go ahead and connect it. If it 
doesn't clunk, then you may have saved the fuse, but it really 
doesn't matter because there's something else wrong in there that 
you're going to have to fix anyway.

I was about to say that I'd never seen one that wouldn't wind, but 
one of the ones I worked over last weekend had a sticky shaft that 
might have kept the winder from working. I don't know, I took it 
apart and found the blown fuse first. Then I oiled the shaft. I'd 
never seen that fault before.

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Jim Adney, jadney at vwtype3.org
Madison, Wisconsin, USA
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