Quail Cuckoo Clock Repair Part 1 of 2

Welcome to Chris's Clock Repair. This video is Quail Cuckoo Clock Repair, Part One.

This project is a little bit different than my previous projects because I'm showing you the entire process. So, this video is much longer than my normal videos. So, I'm releasing it in two parts. And I've added title screens to the various sections. And there's going to be a timestamp down in the description so that you can go to, uh, the exact sections you want to see so you don't have to watch the whole thing.

And I want you to know that this video came about as a result of requests that I received through my YouTube channel, uh, from, uh, the viewers. So, I encourage you to comment and let me know what it is you'd like to see, what you like and don't like. So, in future content, you're seeing what you want to see. Okay, my entire channel is based on what it is that you want.

All right, the other thing I want you to know is, um, I didn't realize it at the time of recording, but the rear microphone on my phone, uh, was broken. So, a lot of the audio was missing when I went to edit the video. So, this video is, uh, a voice-over. But I've since got a new phone and moving forward, and all my future videos, you'll hear my voice live, uh, commenting as I repair, uh, the clocks. So, give me your feedback. I hope you like it. Yes, it's long, but the point is, I want to teach you, uh, something about clock repair. So, I hope you learn a lot, and that's the purpose of this video. All right, thanks for watching.

All right, so the first, first thing you're going to want to do is study the motion works of the clock you're working on. This is especially true if it's one you're not familiar with or you've never worked on before. So, here we're working on a quail cuckoo clock, and it's got three trains: the quail train on the right, time train on the center, and on the left, you got the bird train. Now, taking a closer look at the quarter hour, the quail will call three times. Then at the half hour, the quail will call six times. And then the bird will call once at 3/4 hours. The bird will call nine times. Then at the hour, it'll call 12 times. Then the bird will call the number of hours. This particular movement is kind of unusual. It's more of a modern quail cuckoo movement, and most quail cuckoo movements only call the bird on the hour. So, make sure you understand how the assembly works before you go to disassembly.

So, now the first thing you want to do in disassembly is take off the hands. They're held in place by a hand nut. It's usually you can loosen by hand. Then a second nut to hold the minute hand. Just give a gentle twist with your pliers while holding the hand from moving, and then do the rest of the job by hand. Then you'll simply be able to pull the hands off. You might have a washer in between, as we do in this case. And then the hour hand is just press fit to the hour tube.

Next, you want to remove the bird perch from the doors. And this could be done with a pair of tweezers or a pair of pliers. Pliers are probably better, as you'll see I have a little trouble here using my tweezers. You want to bend it almost to vertical, just enough to be able to slide that wire out of the door. Okay, then you can lock the doors. And now you're ready to remove the bellows. The bellows are held in place by a screw, usually at the top of the bellows whistle. And then, uh, you've got a positioning nail towards the bottom of the bellows to prevent it from rotating. So, you just unscrew, uh, the screw, and then you can pop the bellows off, usually with a screwdriver with a very light twist. If the bellows are glued in place, then you're not going to want to use a screwdriver to pry them off. You're going to have to use a different technique. But as you can see here, this little nail, and you just kind of, uh, use your flathead screwdriver to rotate the bellows out of the nail. And once you've got the bellows off, you just kind of wiggle, wiggle it loose from the wire that it's attached to. Then we're going to do the same on the other side. This, this side has two bellows, and we're going to mark them so we know which one is, uh, towards the rear and which one is towards the front. Then after that, we'll be ready to take the movement out.

Okay, now we're ready to remove the movement. The movement is held in place by four screws. You'll also have to either remove the chains or remove the chain hooks at the bottom of them to pull the movement out. I typically remove the chains first, but I actually forgot to do that before I loosen these screws. But that's okay. We're going to loosen the screws, then we're going to remove the chain hooks, then we're going to pull the movement out, and that'll work just fine. So, this movement also has, uh, two wires that hang down to allow you to adjust the sequence of the quail call and the bird call. And it's just a piece of string that attaches to, um, the stop arm on either side, the bird and the quail side, with a brass ring tied at the end. So, we're just going to untie those, remove the brass rings, and then the movement will be able to move, uh, freely out of the case once I remove the chains. So, sometimes your chains are jammed up in the case, and it could be hard to remove the chain link that's holding these hooks on. And, uh, if that's the case, then I'll just use my, um, cutters and cut away the chain link that's holding it in place, which I did for the first one. So, once I've got the chain hooks on, I can pull the chains freely through. And sometimes if you don't do it quick enough, or if you don't do it straight, the chain could get stuck in the ratchet wheel, which is the case here on the final chain that I have there. So, now I'm just going to pull the movement out and get that final chain free. And I tell you, these chains are like octopus arms. They will grab onto anything, twist up, and get all, uh, tied up on you. So, just be aware of that.

Okay, so now I got my movement free of the case and I'm ready to start inspecting it closer. So, now what I'm going to do is manually turn the gears and watch the action of the bird side with the count wheel. And really, I want to understand how this works, what causes it to go, what causes it to stop. And that way, when I'm assembling the clock, I know how it's supposed to function. We're going to take a closer look at just how the quail and the bird work later in the video. Right now, I'm just taking a cursory look at the condition of the bushings. And when I look at the time train here, I see a lot of dirt and grime and a lot of movement in that pivot hole. Now, I can also notice that this clock's been worked on. There's bushings in there already. So, I'll knock those bushings out and replace them with fresh ones as opposed to having to bush the hole from scratch, but we'll be doing that as well. So, once you understand how the movement works, finish disassembling it, and then we'll begin on the repair.

All right, so now we're going to remove the count wheel. The count wheel is held in place by a single screw, and we're simply just going to unscrew that, take that off. Then we're going to remove the pinion that drives the count wheel. That's attached to the ratchet wheel on the bird side. It's held in place by a single pin, and we'll remove that with our pliers, or we can push it out as shown here. Sometimes you can remove these by hand, or you need to use something like a pair of pliers. But really, the preferred method, and I don't do it here, is actually take this off by pushing the gear out through the plate after you've removed the front plate, and then that way you don't mar the teeth of the pinion. So, don't do what I just did there. Now, when I move the ratchet wheel, I can see that there's quite a bit of wear there at this pivot. So, we'll be repairing that.

Now I'm going to move, uh, the rear bridge or backcock. It's held in place by a single screw, and there's a positioning nail or pin to the right of it. And, um, this is such that you can move it up and down a little bit so you can adjust the depth thing on your, your verge and escapement. Now I'm trying to take the verge out here, but, um, I actually have to remove the front before it'll come out, come out. So, we'll go ahead and do that, and the verge will just fall out.

Now we're going to remove the front works. We're going to remove the pin that holds the intermediate wheel there. Here, I'll use my pliers. We'll remove the washer, the hour tube, the center shaft that lifts the, the wire to actuate the bird, and the intermediate wheel is held tight to the shaft by this retaining spring. And then the center shaft of the movement is threaded on, so we can remove that. And I'll get it started with my pliers here, but again, you never want to mar any part of the clock with your tools. So, I ended up having to clean that up afterwards, but that just screws right out of there.

Okay, now we're going to remove the bird perches. Held in place by two different, two separate brackets, one on the bottom and one on the top. Then there's a wire spring that, uh, provides tension to the bird perch to, uh, pull it back from the door when it's done with its call. You want to be careful with the spring wire not to break it when you're removing it. And if it's in poor condition, you're going to want to replace it. You can also observe how the spring is attached to try to put it back in the, the same position, assuming it's working correctly. Now, that's one thing to know about clock repair is when somebody else has worked on it, sometimes a lot of your repair is fixing the repairs of previous repairmen. So, I know this clock has been worked on, and I'll take careful notice to make sure nothing was done that shouldn't have been done.

So, now that we've removed the perches, um, we're left with just a bare movement. I've got the count wheel on the quail side yet to take off, and then all my lift wires. So, these lift wires are typically held in place by a pin to prevent them from falling out of the movement. In this case, we have a little bracket here that holds these two in position, which is a little unusual, actually. So, now I begin removing these wires, pulling the pins out to hold them in place. See, see the pin here? There we go. And you can see it's already trying to fall out of the movement. And these wires can just be kind of wiggled out of there. They have to be removed in a correct sequence because they do, um, interfere with one another. Stop arm here, it's got a spring wire that holds it, uh, causes it to fall down on the maintenance cam inside the movement. And then that pin there that's sticking out, you just pull that out, and that stop arm will come right out of there. Just be gentle and patient, but, um, these will just come right out of there. And you see here, this, this wire interferes with the gong lever. So, we're going to move the gong lever first, and then you'd put them back in in reverse order. And there we go.

Now moving on to the bird side. Pretty much the same procedure. We're going to take the spring wire off the stop arm, pull that pin out. Now we should be able to jockey that out of there. And again, just be patient. Don't force anything. Should come right out of there, nice and smooth, or not so smooth, but it will come out of there. There we go. Just need a little, little help from the tweezers. Okay, now the rest of these are going to be nice and easy. And that's that. So, I've just removed all the lift wires from the quail and the cuckoo side. I just got to take the quail cam off. That's just pressed on there, and you can take that off by pushing the ratchet wheel through the plate after you remove the movements, or in my case, I was able to just twist it off.

Okay, now we're going to get into our bushing work. And you can use a red marker. I use red instead of black because red comes off in the cleaner, so I don't have to worry about using a degreaser or anything like that to remove the marking. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to mark the direction of the pivot bearing where it's not worn. So, if I move the gears in the direction of motion or power, I can see where the pivot is going to exert force on the movement and where it out. Sometimes it's very easy to see where the wear is. Other times it's not so easy. So, you want to jockey those gears so you can see it, and then I'll mark opposite that with my marker so I know where to find the center of the hole. And you can watch the link above for my video on how to do bushing work, but I'll demonstrate it here as well. So, I just marked that one that had a bushing in it. I don't need to do that because I'm going to knock the bushing out instead of cutting the hole, but I just did it for the purpose of showing you. So, again, I'm marking the good side of the hole because that's the direction I'm going to cut to match the wear on the other side of the hole. And I'm going to do that for each of the trains.

So, now I've got all my holes marked, and I want to be disassembling the movement, and then I'll begin cutting my holes to find the center, and then I'll be drilling them out the rest of the way with my drill press. So, I'm going to take the movement apart by loosening the four nuts in the corners. Now I'm just going to lift the plate off, and voila, I have my gear trains exposed. Now, typically, I'll take a picture of this so that I know how the clock goes back together if there's any question.

Now, this is optional, but I typically will measure the size of each pivot and write it down on a piece of paper for both, for all three trains. So, I'll measure both the rear and the front pivots, and I'll write it down on my piece of paper. And the reason I write it down is because then I don't have to go back and measure again when I'm selecting, uh, the size of the drill bits I'm going to use to cut the holes. I can just look at my paper and I know what each, uh, bushing size I'm going to use for each gear, and then the resulting drill bit I'll use to drill out the center of the bushing hole to size the gears.

So, this is the wheel that the stop cam drops into. See that little notch? And I'll check that for wear. They do wear out. Now here, when I'm examining the ratchet wheel, I want to check the ratchet and the spring and make sure it's not jammed, it's not too tight, and it's not too loose. If it is, we'll have to do something about it. So, here again, I'm examining the maintenance cam for the stop arm on the bird side, checking the ratchet.

All right, so now I've taken all my measurements. I've checked the ratchets on each of the great wheels, and I'm ready to start my bushing work. All right, so sometimes it's useful to clean out the grime around your holes with a toothpick so you can see how you're doing on your cuts. So, now what I'm going to do is I'm going to place my reamer in the worn side of the hole, opposite of my mark, perpendicular where my cutter is just outside the worn part, and I'm going to cut 180 degrees. So, I'm only cutting on one side of the hole. So, I'm essentially removing material from the good side of the hole until I've removed enough material to make that hole centered and round again. So, I'm going to go do a half turn again, and I'm going to do that until my hole, the worn edge, is now the outside edge of my concentric round hole. And as the hole becomes more and more round, I might go slightly further than 180-degree turn to make sure I'm cutting, uh, the hole perfectly round. And then when I get it round, just about right, I'll drill the rest of the way with my reamer in the drill press to make sure I cut it perfectly straight. Be patient with this. It does take a lot of practice. You can finish up the hole by hand if you like. So, there I've removed material from the side with the red mark. It's made my hole round again, and to move the hole so that the center is where it originally was. Now that I've got my hole on center, I'm going to drill the rest of the way on my press, and that'll ensure that, uh, my cut was straight. And I'll speed things up, and I'll just use a mason jar or a glass jar, uh, to hold the plate flat as I drill through the, through the plate.

Next, I'm going to put in my chamfering tool, and I'm going to chamfer the hole before I insert the bushing, just to remove any burrs that might be sticking out as a result of my reamer cut. And I'll do that on the inside of the plate and the outside of the plate. Next, I'm ready to insert my bushing. So, I grab the bushing I need for my assortment. In this case, it's a 450 millimeter. I don't want my bushings too large, but they've got to have enough material to support your pivot. Now, I'm going to put my plate on a block in my drill press. I'm going to use an aluminum rod that I have with a flat end to push it in, and I'll push it flat against the outside of the plate from the inside. And then if it's protruding from the plate at all, I'll cut it down with my pivot cutter. I had two lines on that hole because I made a mistake in marking the one side, so the longer side was the actually the, uh, the side I needed to cut into.

So, now I've repeated that process for each of the holes. And for the ones that were already bushed, I pushed those out and put new bushings in. I didn't recut the holes because the clock was running before, I assume they did a pretty good job of finding the center. So, now you'll see that many of my bushings are protruding out of the plate, and we don't want that. So, we're going to have to cut them down. Now, this bushing needs to be flat against the back side of the plate. So, I'm going to push it back through over a jar so it goes through the plate and is flat against the back, the back side of the plate, because I'd rather cut down the bushings from the inside than the outside because it's going to remove a little bit of material from the inside of the plate to make it flush. So, this is my pivot cutter. It's my 300 size pivot cutter, and that's going to cut down, uh, all the bushings except the large, larger 450 bushings that I did. And I'm going to use my drill press to do this, and I'll put my block, I'll put my plate on my block, and I'll cut the bushing down until it's flat against the plate. And this is so I have proper endshake for each of my wheels. So, just show you that there it is, and I'll do that for each of the bushings that are protruding from the plate. You can purchase bushings of different widths or heights, um, which if they're equal to or slightly less than the thickness of the plate, you wouldn't need to do this step. I tend to buy the taller bushings because then I can use them for any size plate or clock rather than having different size heights for different clocks. This way, it's kind of like I have a universal bushing. But if you don't want to cut the bushings down, then you would need to have different height bushings in stock for different types of movements.

Now I just run my fingernail across each bushing to make sure that it's not sticking out from the plate at all. Now I have to size the inner diameter of each of the bushings to match the pivots. And for the larger bushings, I'll pre-drill the holes with my reamers. So, the pivot size for this particular bushing is 2.95 millimeters. So, I'm going to use my 2.97 millimeter reamer to pre-drill the hole to get close to the size of the pivot, and that'll save me time, boring time. So, I'm going to finish the holes off with my broaches. But for the larger ones, I can get them started with my reamer. For the smaller ones, I use a drill bit.

So, now that I've pre-drilled my holes with my reamer, I'm going to check the fit of my ratchet wheel, and it doesn't quite fit through there, which I knew. So, now what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull my drill bit set, and I'm going to pre-drill the hole with a drill slightly larger than my pivot size, just enough so it fits through. And I've got my handy-dandy little chart here that I've made for the various pivot sizes and the drill bit that I need to use. I also have a drill bit plate that you could use to size which bit to use, but I like my little note card better. So, here I pulled out my drill bit. I'm going to measure the size just to double check, and it's 3.01 millimeters, 3.02. So, the pivot size is 2.95, so it's 0.06 millimeters larger, just slightly larger, that's what I'm going for. So, I'm going to go ahead and put my drill bit in my press, put my plate on my jar, and go ahead and drill that out. Now, since I already cut it with the reamer, it's just cutting a little bit of material so it doesn't grab the brass. You do want to hold your plate firm though when you do it so that your hole cuts straight.

Now, when I put that gear in there, goes in there, and I can finish the rest off with my five-sided cutting broach. So, now what I want to do before my final cut, I want to use my chamfering tool to create a shoulder on the bushing that's going to provide a little extra breathing room for your pivot shoulder. Okay, so then I'm going to put that in there, kind of watch how much it moves in either direction. I want to make sure my hole is nice and round, like so, it doesn't bend too much to one side. That's nice and, nice and round. So, I want to make sure I chamfer that shoulder before I use my broach. Now, here, because the hole is, I don't need to use a cutting broach. I'm just going to use my smoothing broach, and that'll, um, remove material from my shoulder and provide a hardened surface bearing surface on the bushing, and be a nice smooth surface for my polished pivot to ride on. So, I'm going to put my smoothing broach in my Jacobs chuck. I needed to get some wooden handles for these. I haven't done that yet. So, in the meantime, using this chuck, and then, uh, put some oil. I have an old oiler here that I just took the cap off. I kind of dipped that in there, and I slide that in the hole, and we're going to smooth that hole out. Okay, there. Now we've got a hardened, smooth bearing surface for our pivot that's on center and round. So, that's the procedure we're going to do for each pivot hole that we're bushing, and then, um, we'll put the trains together, make sure they're all working properly, and everything looks good.

Okay, now I'm going to show you an example of sizing the pivot hole on a situation where I'm going to need to use my five-sided cutting broach first. So, as a matter of course, you want to inspect every pivot, make sure none are bent, make sure they're smooth and polished. So, I'm going to set up my broach set in my little wooden holder that I made. I've got my cutting broaches on the right and my smoothing broaches on the left. So, one trick you can do before you use your cutting broach, you can take a smoothing broach, stick it through your hole so that it's tight, and you can look at how straight it is. You can see whether or not you cut the hole straight. And if it's off slightly, which in this case it looks like it is a little bit, you can correct that with your cutting broach by cutting slightly to that opposite side to put your hole back on center. So, if I put this wheel in there, you'll see that it rotates more to the right than the left, a little bit more to the right than to the left. So, when I drilled the hole out, it didn't drill it perfectly round, just to be expected. So, I'm going to use my cutting broach, open up this hole so that there's a little more play and the hole is cut straight. So, I'm going to grab my pin vise, put my broach in there, and I'm ready to cut. Now, you're going to want to take your time with these cuts. It's easy to take away material, it's not so easy to add it. So, we're going to go ahead and put this in there. You want to make sure you're cutting straight, so you got to look in two different directions on your plate, make sure you're perpendicular to the plate in two different directions, and then you know you're straight. So, look in one direction, then turn the plate and look in the other. Okay, then you know you're straight, and you give it a few turns and open up that hole. Then you can check your progress, take the broach out, put your wheel back in, and see that your, your hole is remaining round and that you've got the play that you desire. And you just continue this process until you get it right where you want it, and then we'll broach it out with the smoothing broach.

Okay, so finished with our five-sided cutting broach. Our wheel looks pretty good, rotating around evenly in all directions. And it's time for our smoothing broach. So, put our smoothing broach in our pin vise. And before I do that, I'm going to chamfer the hole, make a shoulder. And I, I chamfer both sides, but it's the inside plate that's most important that you have a shoulder. But I like to clean off any burrs with my chamfering tool on the, on the front side of the plate as well. Then I'll dip my smoothing broach into my oil, and we'll smooth this hole out, harden it, turn into a good bearing surface for our pivot. Okay. Okay, so just final check on our pivot and our wheel motion in our nearly broached and smooth bushing hole. I'd say that looks pretty good. So, uh, we can put the plates together and, uh, give her a spin. And what I like to do is, um, hold the movement in all four directions and spin it and see if in any given direction it doesn't spin quite as freely. If it doesn't, then you may have a problem. Now, I'm going to check the endshake really quick, which is the, the distance that travels up and down between the plates. Make sure it's adequate, and it is. And realize that when you tighten down the plates, that endshake may reduce slightly, so you might want to hold the plates together with the nuts when you check that. But I'm just checking it for a general, general test here and for the purpose of the video. So, I like to check it, as I said, in four different directions and make sure I got a nice free spin in all four directions. Now, of course, I have not cleaned this movement or oiled it.

Okay, so here in slow motion, I've got, uh, the one side pivot showing. You want to make sure that you can visually, with your naked eye, see the pivot move in the bushing. Now, there might actually be a little bit more play here than I typically like to see, but it's not too much to be concerned about. But you want to make sure that when you move it side to side in the direction that it travels, that you can see it move. Now, on the back side, I can see this move, but it's far less daylight in the bearing or bushing, and this is more of an ideal situation. So, you just repeat that process for all of the bushing holes, and then you're ready to clean the movement, and then you'll be ready to assemble.

Now, before I assemble the whole movement, I'm going to check each train. This is not required, but I thought it'd be a good idea for the video. So, I'm going to put in the quail side train here, and I'll assemble that train. And these cuckoo movements are a little bit easier to put together than the grandfather clock movements or the Hermes, and especially the striking movements. The pivots aren't quite as small on the warning wheel or the fly, so you're much less likely to, uh, bend any pivot. But here I'm going to go ahead and, uh, hold the plates together and put the pivots into place. And I'm going to check for endshake and make sure that my gear train is operating smoothly.

Okay, so with very little for, for at all, my gear train is very smooth. And, um, can add a little oil to each pivot and really get to see how this train is going to fly. And of course, I didn't clean the movement yet, so dirt and grime in the pinions and the wheel gear teeth, um, obviously will be removed in the course of cleaning, which will improve the quality of this motion. But I like to test it before cleaning because if it runs well without cleaning, I know it's going to run really well after. And again, testing in four different directions, it's a good idea. See if any of your wheels are hanging up. If they are in one direction and not the others, you might have a bushing that's a little bit too tight on one side, and you might need to open it up. If your bushing holes are too loose, you're going to, you're going to create depth issues between the gears and pinions, and you'll lose power, and the, and the clock may stop. If they're too tight, there's not enough freedom to move, and your clock won't run. So, there's a happy medium, just enough play, you need endshake, very little side shake.

Okay, here in slow motion, showing you the motion of one of the pivots, and you can see that there's some free motion there, but it's not flopping around. When I go back and forth, it moves to the left and right a bit. If I change directions.

Okay, so here's the front and back of the movement, and, um, I pushed out the original bushings and put new ones in there. Now I'm going to install them on the movement. So, I can use my pivot cutter to cut them down, and then pre-drill the holes, and follow the basic procedure shown earlier for bushing the pivot holes in the plate. The only difference here is there's the added step of having to take these on and off because you don't want to press the bushing into these when they're attached to the clock, so you can bend and break it. So, I like to take them off when I'm putting the bushings in, put them back in when I'm cutting them, and I'll have to take them back off again for assembly. So, as shown earlier, just showing it again, we're going to use a jar this time instead of my block because it's not flat. When I use my pivot cutter to cut down the bushing, just want to be careful that, um, you don't put too much pressure on that, cause it to bend or break or crack. This is going in 2X, just so you know. So, I'm putting in a drill bit this time. We're going to pre-drill these pivot holes in these new bushings so they're close to the size of the pivots on the crutch or verge. And I'll just show you this one more time. The pivot holes themselves are what guides the drill bit. So, you want to hold the plate firm to the jar, but not so firm that the plate can't move at all, because if it needs to adjust to center the drill, you want to allow it to do that.

So, now we're going to place our verge here in the hole, and as you can see, it's pretty tight. And, uh, we'll go ahead and broach that out, just like we did with the other gears. Okay, so now we're going to broach out the hole for the verge. Going to test our fit. Broach a little bit more out. Test our fit again. Looks pretty good. So, now I'm going to chamfer the hole and use my smoothing broach. And voila. Okay, so that looks pretty good.

Okay, now I'm going to demonstrate how I polish the surface of the pivots using my drill press. Can also be done in the lathe. Some people have rollat machines to do this, but I don't have any fancy equipment here, but I find that using my drill press does the job pretty good. So, I put my wheel in the press, I'll turn it, and I'll use my Emory board to smooth off the surface, my bearing surface on the pivot. Depending on how rough the surface is, I might use more or less grit. In some cases, may have to file off some burrs. Then I'll use the finer paper like so to finish it off, and that looks pretty good. You can do this on the lathe with a, um, steady rest. You can do this with a roll mat machine, um, but when I get a good grip on the, uh, arbor, I can do this on the drill press. And I'm just going to, uh, run my Emory board across the pivot, and then, uh, I'll take some very high grit paper, maybe 1,800 or 2,000, uh, grit paper, and run along the, the pivot. That produces a very nice finish, remove any scratches or mars, and it looks pretty darn good. See there? I'm pretty happy with that. Now, you don't generally want to grab the pivot with your chuck, but sometimes you have to, and you just want to be gentle and careful. All right, that turned out pretty good, nice and shiny.

All right, so now that I've done that for all my gears, I'm ready to clean the movement and all the wheels. I clean the movement separate to the wheels, and I do it outside in my backyard. I've got a tub, some clock cleaning solution in it, and I'll dunk that in there. I don't have an ultrasonic cleaning machine or any fancy equipment like that, so maybe I'd get better results using another method, but this is certainly effective. So, I give the, uh, bucket a little swirl there, leave that in there for about 20 minutes, then I put it in some mineral spirits and dry it off. And look at that, that's pretty darn clean. And all the red marker that I had on there, as you can see, is no longer present.

Okay, now I'm going to, um, clean up my wheel pinions. We'll see grime accumulate in there, and I'll just push that out with a toothpick. Now, you want to inspect the warning pins, make sure they're not loose, bent, or damaged in any way. They're relatively straightforward to replace if you need to, just a pin through the, through the wheel there, but you do want to check for that.

Okay, so now we're going to put this thing back together. Got my bird side wheels over there on the left, time in the center, and over here on the right, I've got my quail side wheels. So, before I assemble it, I'm going to take a closer look at each of the wheels. And if there's any remaining grime or dirt in the pinions, which sometimes there is after I clean them, I'll remove it with a toothpick. And if the pinions are really messed up or damaged, I might take a thin piece of emery cloth and, um, smooth those out. So, I'm going to check the teeth as well, make sure there's no bent teeth, broken or missing teeth. And on the fly, I want to make sure that the fly actually moves on the shaft, but is held tight in place. I want to make sure the ratchet wheel, the ratchet moves freely, and that the click on the front of the ratchet is not worn. And I want to check the escape wheel, each tooth, make sure they're not bent or damaged in any way. So, this is the click on the ratchet wheel. Moves away from the ratchet. It's held in place by a spring, and in some cases, the spring could be broken or damaged, or the click could be misshapen, so you have to check for that. Also, they can be too tight or too loose, in which case you move the bushing on the back, that gold bushing there, you can tighten that up or loosen it up if necessary.

All right, so now we're ready to put the wheels in our movement and assemble it. And I'll show you guys how to position the maintenance cams with respect to the warning wheel pins. So, here I'm putting in the maintenance cam on the bird side, and I want that drop to be at 90 degrees, right there, 90 degrees. Okay, because that's where the stop arm is going to drop in. I'll show you. So, here's my stop arm, as you can see, it's going to fit over that, just like so. That's the stopped position. So, my warning pin is going to hit here, the end of the arm. So, I need to be sure that my warning pin is positioned such that it's at 3:00. So, there's a little bit of run. So, I want it right here at 3:00 when the maintenance cam is at 90 degrees. And then I'll allow enough run for it to stop. In fact, I actually move it a little bit beyond 3:00, maybe like 3:20 or 3:30, and that'll work good for you. Now, the movement may need to adjust the position of the warning wheel after you put the movement together because sometimes these gears can move on you. So, just be aware of that. So, we'll check that after we assemble the movement, make sure it's still in our position.

All right, now I'm putting in the fly, and hopefully my fly will help keep that warning wheel from moving while I put the rest of the movement together. Now, I find it helpful to put a little block or something underneath so that I can put my wheels in without them bottoming out on my bench. So, I put my block up there. The center train, uh, doesn't have any special orientation required, just goes in, and any way is fine. Now, I'm going to put in my quail side, and the warning pin catches slightly different on the stop arm on this side, but again, I want my maintenance cam to be positioned so the drop is at 90 degrees.

All right, so similar to the bird side, we've got our stop arm here. It's going to fit in our maintenance cam there, and the pin on the warning pin actually interfaces, not the outside of the arm, but the inside of the arm on this side. So, when you position the warning wheel to catch on the inside here, on the inside arm, that's where the warning pin hits. So, when you position your warning wheel at 3:00 or slightly beyond 3:00, it's going to be on the same side as the position of the warning wheel on the other. Okay, just like so. And again, when you put your movement back together, again, these, uh, gears can move a little bit, so you may have to reposition them after the movement's together, but we'll take a look at that as we come to it.

So, now I've got all my gears in position, and as you can see, my warning wheel over there moved a little bit. So, there we go. Everything's in position. Now I need to put on my plate. And I have another video, the link is above if you'd like to watch it on the technique I use for putting a movement together. Now, on these cuckoo clocks, you've got the large or the long arbors from the ratchet wheels that come out. So, I will get those through the pivot holes, like so, and then I'll lift the movement up and use my tweezers to get the rest of the pivot holes into position, or pivots into position. So, once I get the bottom wheels, the bottom ratchet wheels in place, then I'll lean the movement on the bench. I'll lay it flat upright, and I'll put the rest of the wheels in place. Like I'm holding the movement like it's a, a sandwich, light pressure with my left hand as I use tweezers to put the rest of the pivots in their correct holes. Now, I apologize for my hand getting in the way here of the camera, but if you watch my other video on putting a movement together, I make sure that you can see what I'm doing. And again, what I did was I made sure my large wheels, the ones with the ratchets on at the bottom of the movement, are in place, and then I, um, stand the movement upright and I put the rest of the wheels in with my tweezers, applying a light pressure with my left hand and systematically moving all the wheels into position, and taking special note of the position of the warning wheels relative to the maintenance cams on both the bird and quail side to do my best to get them at about three and 3:00 or 3:30 relative to the maintenance cam when it's at 90 degrees. Okay, take your time on this part. You don't want to be too forceful. The pivots on these cuckoo clocks are actually quite, uh, large in diameter, so the likelihood that you'd bend them is not very high, but you do want to be careful not to bend any pivots by squeezing the movement too hard together.

All right, so now I've got my movement together, and we're going to put the nuts on to secure the plates together. Then we're going to see, uh, how these wheels fly. Now, I want to check each wheel, make sure that I have endshake. Each wheel moves up and down a little bit. They're not too tight against the plates. They look pretty good. So, now just checking the quail side gear train. Looks like it's moving very well, as well as the time. There, everything looks to be moving very smoothly. And I haven't put any oil on it yet, so it'll run even better when I do put oil on it. So, now what I'm going to do next is we're going to install all the levers for the bird side, the quail side, and then the count wheels.