cracked mainspring barrel

[gerene]

I have a German, mass produced, clock movement on my bench.

First of all, it is quite dirty and will be cleaned. The more ennoying problem is that the mainpsring barrel for the going train is cracked.

What would be the best repair for this?

Any help appreciated.

Thanks,

Jan

[bernie weishapl]

Jan I had the exact same movement in the shop in January. It also was quite dirty. It also had a barrel missing a couple of teeth and had a crack in the same place at a angle going up from the rivit. I am sure there are other ways to fix those but I just had a new one made. Safest IMHO. I had a friend of mine Mike Loebbaka in New York make me a new barrel. I just sent him my old barrel and he made me a new one. His e-mail is [email protected]. He is reasonable in his prices but not cheap. The lady that owned the clock didn’t care as it was a anniversary gift from her late husband. He has also made me several arbors for me for a winterhalder 9 tube and 6 tube chimes. These had square ends on the arbors which held the gathering pallets with small holes in the ends for wire to hold the pallet on. The arbor broke right where it came thru the plate. He has a ad in the NAWCC mart if you happen to get it.

[arutha]

If the great wheel is soldered on to the barrel wall then heat it very gently until you can tap off the wheel. The barrel wall can then be repaired with silver solder and the great wheel can then be soldered back onto the wall. This takes a bit of practice, too much heat to the teeth and it will weaken them so you are using just enough heat to get the solder to flow. The reason for using silver solder on the barrel wall is that it has a higher melting point than soft solder so when you come to put the great wheel back on it wont all run back out of the crack. As Bernie says, if you have tooth damage as well then get a new one made. I have made this repair on a french clock barrel and have seen Daryn perform this repair a couple of times.
Paul.

[david pierce]

I believe there are several Youtube videos covering how to silver solder. It produces a very strong bond but requires a few techniques to do properly.
david

[willofiam]

Jan, you may also want to plug that hole and relocate the mainspring hook. William
P.S. If you need to have the whole thing made Jan and since I am new at cutting teeth, I would be open to giving it a go for the practice and only for material and shipping costs, I will offer this to anyone in need on the forum for a time.

[chris mabbott]

Jan, this link might provide some helpful information
http://www.copperinfo.co.uk/alloys/brass/downloads/design-in-brass/johnson-matthey.pdf

William, thank you for your very kind and generous offer, I have about 20+ gears that I need replacing, if you could send me your mailing address I’ll ship them right out to you 😆

[willofiam]

Chris, aren’t you supposed to be in bed????? O.K. I get it, yes I will do them for you but at midnight Spains time the limited time is already up, sorry, William
P.S. for everyone else it is still open

[david pierce]

Chris,
Once you get your new mill up and running and get some dividing attachments, you can cut quality precision gears. One nice feature with the mill you bought is having plenty of room on the bed to take advantage of a larger high precision dividing head and tail stock. This will allow you to do high precision work with fewer problems such as chatter and movement that you have to work around using smaller equipment. A dividing head with a worm drive and dividing plates will index far more accurately than a direct hole plate due to error reduction. Many of the old watch part machines from the past such as rounding up tools are now obsolete due to the precision that modern tools can now produce.
david

[gerene]

@willofiam wrote:

Jan, you may also want to plug that hole and relocate the mainspring hook. William
P.S. If you need to have the whole thing made Jan and since I am new at cutting teeth, I would be open to giving it a go for the practice and only for material and shipping costs, I will offer this to anyone in need on the forum for a time.

Thanks for the offer William, but I will first try to repair it. The teeth are all ok. My knowledge about soldering brass is close to nothing…. so this will be a challenge. My education (long time ago )was as an electronics engineer and my professional career was software and some hardware development mainly in the process control environment. So apart from occasionaly soldering some electronic components I know anything at all about the subject. Time to learn something new

Jan

[willofiam]

Hey Jan, @gerene wrote:

Time to learn something new

great way to look at it, might as well try to fix the old one and if that does not work to your satisfaction then you can make a new one. Is there a rush on the job? If remember correctly you have a lathe big enough to do this? , could be possible to find a existing barrel that can be refashioned to match this one and if all else fails start fresh. William

[gerene]

@Arutha wrote:

If the great wheel is soldered on to the barrel wall then heat it very gently until you can tap off the wheel. The barrel wall can then be repaired with silver solder and the great wheel can then be soldered back onto the wall. This takes a bit of practice, too much heat to the teeth and it will weaken them so you are using just enough heat to get the solder to flow. The reason for using silver solder on the barrel wall is that it has a higher melting point than soft solder so when you come to put the great wheel back on it wont all run back out of the crack. As Bernie says, if you have tooth damage as well then get a new one made. I have made this repair on a french clock barrel and have seen Daryn perform this repair a couple of times.
Paul.

Hey Paul,

does that mean that I could soft solder the crack when the great wheel is not soldered to the barrel or should it be hard soldered for strength? Trying to learn about soldering here

Jan

[gerene]

@willofiam wrote:

Hey Jan, @gerene wrote:

Time to learn something new

great way to look at it, might as well try to fix the old one and if that does not work to your satisfaction then you can make a new one. Is there a rush on the job? If remember correctly you have a lathe big enough to do this? , could be possible to find a existing barrel that can be refashioned to match this one and if all else fails start fresh. William

No there is no rush to the job. I am retired and only working on clocks as a hobby. I started reading about soldering, but for the moment it is still confusing.

Jan

[chris mabbott]

@willofiam wrote:

Chris, aren’t you supposed to be in bed?????

How could I resist NOT commenting on your generous offer Hmm, now I think of it, I feel like I’ve been setup 😆

Jan, take some scrap material, brass, copper, steel etc and just practice soldering & brazing them together, that’s what they taught us, the instructors would just provide a big box of tokens and leave us for a couple of days. Then he’d show us what we had done wrong, then another box of tokens would appear…. and so it went for two months
I can guarantee that after a short time, you’ll get it all in one go and be providing us with help

[arutha]

Hi Jan, I can’t honestly say if soft soldering the barrel wall would be strong enough, is this your own clock or a customers? If it is your own clock then you could try it and see what happens, worse case scenario would be if the spring broke it would open up the barrel wll crack further and I would absolutely do what William suggests and move the barrel wall hook, plugging the old hole whichever route you take, this is something I missed out and William was good enough to pick up
Soldering brass is no different to soldering any other metal, you just need to make sure it is hot enough for the solder to adhere to it. Make everything as clean as possible (glass scratch brush or wet and dry paper) and a good flux helps.
Paul.

[willofiam]

The guys have some great advice, I would use silver solder. William

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