Clockworks?

On Saturday, Erin drug me out to the farm to help her carry another bed upstairs. After that, she set to work installing more baseboards upstairs and I was left to my own devices.

I do have a list of smaller things to do around the house and near the top was this cuckoo clock. Dad gave this one to Grandma many years ago. I remember it cuckoo-ing, the axeman chopping wood, the waterwheel turning, and the dancers twirling while the music played.

More recently, it didn’t work that way. The dancers didn’t dance at all, the music didn’t play, and the cuckoo was…sickly. It seemed that instead of announcing the hour it announced…something, at about quarter past the hour. A halting cuck…………oo. Cuck…………oo. Never chiming enough times to actually tell you the hour, just chiming enough to let you know it was kinda, barely, still hanging on.

So, first thing first, it was time to get it off the wall and cleaned up. There was a thick coat of dust. Thick.

So I started with a damp cloth, just to reveal the wood beneath.

After the roof, it was some more detail work.

And, finally, it was time to break out the Watco oil and q-tips.

It took some time, but after that, the clock was in better shape, at least aesthetically.

That was the easy part. If nothing else, I thought, I could hang it back on the wall and it’d look good. Of course, I was hoping for more. So, off came the back:

Pretty good tangle of levers in there! Here’s a better image:

After a fair amount of investigating, I figured out the reason that the dancers no longer danced was because one of these levers had been bent so they couldn’t ever dance. Ever. I don’t know if Grandpa got tired of the dancers or what, but some careful bending and experimenting and the dancers danced again!

Then it was just a matter of oiling the clock up. I found some multipurpose oil in the junk drawer and had at it, oiling all the axle points on the gears.

That done, all there was left was to put it back together, wind it up, and see what happened.

Cuckoo??