18 Aug
2011
18 Aug
'11
12:06 p.m.
Then there are the "stamped out of tin can stock" that used to come
Some car clocks were better than others... I remember repairing a
spring-driven (electrically wound) clock for a friend. It didn't see many
worse than other cheap clocks of thast periud, and had quite thick brass
plates, for example.
Lately, the clock in my kitchen wall oven has gone on
the fritz.
It's a cheap GE model that was probably standard on a dozen brands.
The problem is that the works were never enclosed and dust and grease
This sounds like the sowrt of thing that should be taken apart and
cleaned once a year or so. But who is going to do that?
gummed things up, leading to one of the smaller brass
pinions
becoming stripped. I got it working temporarily by inserting a small
washer (there's enough lateral slop), offsetting the pinion slightly.
But the wear on the shaft is evident, so it's bound to fail again.
Sometimes goy can move the pinion along the arbor. Or machine one end of
the arbor and fit an extrended bush in the plate at the other end to move
the whole thing along a bit.
Of course the proper repair involves cutting a new pinion...
Replacement clock prices on eBay are insane--$100 for a used unit
which is essentially a cheap bit of stamping.
Probably becasue most have failed by now and the ones that remair are
**RARE**
Makes me angry at the poor design. A bit of card stock wrapped
around the works would have kept the dust out and considerably
extended the working life. Cost would have been negligible.
Oh don;'t get me started. It's what you get when companies are run by
accountants who can't see beyond the next balance sheet. They figure that
if you can save $0.10 on each item the profits go up. Yes, they do, for
that quarter (or whatever. But then the likes of us buy them, they fail,
and we see how bad the design was. And then we never buy for said company
again./ Whereas if it had been well-deisgned, we'd go back for more and
more things.
Oh well...
-tony