I bought a mechanical chiming clock, it is probably over 30 years old (it is German “Hermle” movement), marked "Made in West Ger,many). I cleaned the movement with WD-40, it runs fine. But it chimes the hours at 15 minutes , instead of on the hour-how do I realign the chime?
Presumably, you have to open the clock, locate the gear which activates the chiming mechanism, disengage it by unscrewing some screw(s) and reset the clock by 15 min before putting it back.
Some people would find this great fun!
You may find this interesting and informative
It may be that the hands have become mis-set on the capstan. I once did this intentionally to an old clock, to make it chine at :45, and all I had to do was pry off the minute hand, which had a square hole fitting over a square capstan, and put it back on a quarter turn off.
So maybe when you reassembled the clock, you got the minute hand 90-degrees off normal.
You’ll want to clean it again with a different product. WD-40 is primarily a water displacer. It isn’t much of a cleaner or lubricant. More importantly, it forms a gummy dust-magnet varnish as it dries that will almost certainly cause problems in your clock. There may be purpose-designed clock movement cleaners out there. I know there are such available for watches. I recently cleaned and rehabilitated an electric chiming clock that was over 50 years old. I very sparingly used the spray version of Ballistol for the gears and such that made up the chiming mechanism. It might not be suitable for a mechanical time keeping movement, though.
**jtur88 **has it. The hands are off by 15 minutes. At least we’re assuming that you mean that the clock strikes ten at 10:15, rather than striking ten at 10:00, 10:15, 10:30 and 10:45, which would be something I’ve never seen a clock do.
Similarly, if the clock strikes ten but the hands are showing 9:00, push the hour hand to 10:00.
And **Scumpup **has it right on the badness of WD-40. For its long term effects, you may as well have sprayed paint on the works. Clocks and watches don’t exactly have huge amounts of torque, so it doesn’t take much gum and gunk to make them misbehave. Also, the dust attracted and held by the goo will slowly grind the bearings into egg-shaped holes. If it gets that bad, it’s possible to drill out the holes and install bushings, but that’s intensive work normally reserved for particularly valuable or irreplaceable movements.
I have a chiming clock made by Hermle and I think I recognise the issue you have. My movement has a “chimes off” lever so you can silence it if desired. When you move it back to “Chime”, the sequence starts at the next part of the cycle from where you stopped it. So it can be misaligned with the time shown. To get it right again, I move the lever to off then on enough times to synchronise the chimes with the time. My previous clock didn’t have the lever, so I synchronised that by moving the hand back to before the quarter, letting it move normally to chime and then repeating until it got in synch.
My clock has “Westminster” chimes, so chimes on the quarter, half, three-quarter and hour. It strikes on the hour, with it matching the time of day. For clarification about striking and chiming, check the Wikipedia article.
Of course, if that’s not your issue, then ignore my advice.
Thanks for the advice…i am buying some clock oil right away.