My Dad's Elgin 8-Day Clock

[Elbee]

This is possibly of completely zero interest to anyone, but if you ever run across one of these WW2 Elgin 8-Day clocks, buy it. It is a great piece of affordable history in my mind.
Over the 40+ years in my custody it has had a dozen homes, been opened, cleaned, stored, lost, found, broken, no doubt dropped, you get the drill.

It had a broken balance wheel and bent fork much like it's 2nd owner, which I had refurbished by an certified aviation instrument rebuilder. Anyway, it is running like an clock and yes, lasts 8 days between rewinding.

I was given all his military service belongings after his death from my stepmom. The story is Dad "picked it up" at maintenance after his last B-17 mission flight. Hmmmm.

The clock was with all his uniforms and flight gear from his time in England with the 8th Air Force serving as a Bombardier Pilot with The Reich Wreckers-306th BGrp/423 BSqd at Thurleigh.
Note: that is not my Dad in the picture. It is me wearing his flight jacket circa '88. Tamms says I was never that young, so what can you do?

There were rumors from my Mom that he had pieces of his Norden bomb site duffel-ed in my grandmother's basement, but that was never confirmed.

He finished his service with the 13th Air Force stationed in the Philippines 1945-46.

Pick up one of these if you can. I've seen these go for like $80 and running, but that was some years ago. I paid "Bobby" in RI $130 for the refurbish. A bargain to me.

Best, LB

[xviper]

A heart warming story. I'm not into heirloom sorts of things but I am interested in clocks. I built my own grandfather clock from one of the old Healthkit products. I gave it to my father-in-law many decades ago and when he and his wife passed, they willed it back to me. So, in a way, it's on the road to being an heirloom
I also recently bought one of these from MotionRC:

https://www.motionrc.com/products/ugears-aero-clock-mechanical-3d-wooden-model-kit-utg0083?variant=42088934408377

This will be my next winter's project and with luck, it'll be a keeper.

[Evan D]

An antique clock I recently rebuilt. 1950 graduation award. My step dad found it when we lived in Japan in the mid 70’s.

[Elbee]

A heart warming story. I'm not into heirloom sorts of things but I am interested in clocks. I built my own grandfather clock from one of the old Healthkit products. I gave it to my father-in-law many decades ago and when he and his wife passed, they willed it back to me. So, in a way, it's on the road to being an heirloom
I also recently bought one of these from MotionRC:

https://www.motionrc.com/products/ugears-aero-clock-mechanical-3d-wooden-model-kit-utg0083?variant=42088934408377

This will be my next winter's project and with luck, it'll be a keeper.

Well how cool is that. Bravo Zulu, Sir, Best, Steve

[Elbee]

An antique clock I recently rebuilt. 1950 graduation award. My step dad found it when we lived in Japan in the mid 70’s.

Is that electric? Presume so. Good story. I do not have any clock building skills; I do have clock breaking skills. At 6 years old, I took apart my grandmother's wind-up alarm clock.

Got it all back together except I could not manage rewinding the mainspring, so I gave up and apologized. Not sure she ever really forgave me for that one.

Best, Steve

[Evan D]

All mechanical, two big main springs. One for the time side and one for the chime side. It keeps really good time but I need to revisit the chime side as it doesn't do the right number of chimes all the time. There's a tiny hair spring that needs to be just right.

[Elbee]

Holy moly, that's incredible. You have skills and patience, my friend. How do you wind it? Man, truly well done.

[Evan D]

If you look at the first picture above the Seikosha there are two holes. Right one winds the time spring and the left the chime spring. I like this stuff and teaching myself new skills. People ask how I know things, by doing... :) I'm very adept at looking at something and being able to tell if it's right or not. I took all the parts out of the clock without pictures the first time and after putting it together again thought it might be a good idea to take pics in case I needed to take it apart again which I did have to do a couple times...

While I was an electronics/ RF microwave tech in the Navy I did calibration and ran calibration labs, both military and civil service standards labs before I got out and did the same commercially for years after that. My comfort area was high end dimensional calibrations down to 0.000,000,1" and I pretty much taught myself. After that I worked for an accreditation body running their accreditation programs (17025 and 17020) and was on the ISO writing committee for ISO/IEC 17025 as well as several international committees for accrediting. Since retiring a bit over 5 years ago my only connection back to that is teaching classes for getting accredited and calculating measurement uncertainties for laboratories doing testing and calibration measurements.

[Elbee]

Yeah, you have the innate talents, but also that tacit knowledge that comes from just doing it. It is a good skill set, Sir, those spatial abilities. Best, Steve