Clock Won't Stop Chiming Or Striking The Hour

We had a service call today for a clock that will not stop striking on the hour. On the top of the hour, the clock would strike until the weight would run down to the bottom of the clock case and eventually stop due to running out of cable.  

There are a few things to check here, but This blog is about the problem we found. The clock striking mechanism is called a "rack and snail" on this particular grandfather clock movement. The release section of the rack part of the movement installs on a shaft as pictured. This shaft comes from the factory without any oil on it. At some point in this clocks life, someone did oil the shaft. The oil eventually dried out, collected dirt and finally gummed up turning into a sticky mess. When the lifter was lifted, it was so sticky that it would not drop back down into position. When the lifter stays in the lifted position, the rack cannot drop down to stop the clock from striking. I had to remove the black clip holding the small lift which allowed me to remove the smaller lifter. I was able to clean all the old oil and reinstalled the smaller lifter back into place. After the small lifter was re-installed, I did not add any oil to the shaft. The small as well as the large lifter were able to drop down into position and the clock operated fine. 

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The picture to the right shows the clock movement back together. The clip was re-installed and the lifters worked as when they were new. Although, many moving parts on a clock movement needs to be oiled, there are a several parts that will not benefit from oiling and some parts that will stop working with oil. 

What oil you use is also critical when it comes time to oil a clock movement. Most clocks from the 1990's and earlier were oiled with natural oils that will breakdown and gum up. Newer clocks have synthetic oils in them that do not break down and gum up as quickly as natural oils.  Synthetic oils vary in quality and unless you use a high quality, Premium synthetic oil, you could be damaging the clock movement and unfortunately, you will not know it until the damage is done. 

We have serviced over 4,000 clocks, mostly Grandfather clocks in the past several years. The clock oil we use is critical to our business. We have done allot of research over the years and have found a small company named Horace Whitlock that sells premium quality synthetic clock oil that is far superior to anything we have used. 

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Of course there are several other problems that will allow a clock to continue to strike non stop and we will discuss them in another blog.

​Please feel free to contact us if you have any other questions.