I was in a restored 1960 Chevy this weekend, and I remembered the sound of those old dashboard clocks-every few minutes , the spring was rewound-“zing”! Now we have quartz clocks-accurate but boring.
When were the last mechanical car clocks made?
I had no idea they did this. It’s like the time I was hunting through my parents’ old stuff and found these giant black CDs that I broke fitting them in my damn player.
(actually, despite being born in the 80s I grew up listening to records and my parents even had a working 8-track in the house)
Seriously though, I guess it makes sense, but I had no idea that something like a zing sound used to be part of the background driving noise (once you turned the Elvis down low enough to hear it).
I drove a '56 chevy for three years and don’t remember hearing the “zing” sound.
This Site seems to indicate that most clocks were Electric into the 1950s (well, they say 1950s & 1960s, but you’d think GM would have been electric as soon as possible). The site doesn’t seem to indicate the mechanical clocks that came in the decades before were self-winding - it seems you, the car-owner, manually wound them.
What’s baffling me is why would GM install a motor to wind up a spring clock, when simple DC motors (pre-alternators) able to run clocks had been available for decades before, and certainly since WWII…
The first clock I ever saw in a car was a Honda Accord in about 1992; it was a 7 segment LED. Come to think of it this same car was the first time I ever saw a car phone too.
All I remember from clocks in old cars (and I am old enough to remember when those cars were new) is that the damn things never worked.
It was pretty much a “given” that if you had an analog clock in your car, it didn’t work two weeks after you bought it.
I was born in 1963 and every car that I remember had no clock, most had an empty space on the dash were the clock would be but it was never used.
My '60 Chevy’s clock was a pretty conventional wind-it-up type clock mechanism, except that it had a simple coil spring instead of a mainspring. When the spring lost its tension, a couple contacts closed and a electromagnet kicked in and yanked on the spring, “rewinding” it. (The “zing”)
Never worked for diddley; but I kept it in, just to fill the hole in the dash.
Man, that Chevy was something. Best engine in the world, installed in a stupidly designed chassis with a cramped interior, put together by apes.
Yes, that is what i am desribing-a mechanical clock that is rewound by a DC electric motor. My Dad told me that these clocks had a short life-mostly because the contact points woul arc and burn. he used to take hic dash clocks out and clean the contacts with sandpaper