Choosing the Perfect Spring for Your Barreled Spring Clock: A Guide for Working Clock Repairmen

Correctly choosing a proper replacement main spring when a clock has missing springs (or the wrong springs installed) is a very common problem that clock repairmen often face. From the beginning of his career as a clock repairman, Richard Hansen noticed that when his customers brought him their clocks to be repaired, he would often see evidence of poor repairs, poor techniques and even gross mistakes inflicted on them by previous repairmen. He wondered why he should believe that every spring he found was, in fact, the perfect one for the clock in question? And when he found a spring where the outer end had obviously been re-worked (thus making the spring a bit shorter), he wondered how he would know if it was not then too short? Was it possible to redo the end again, or will that make the spring impossibly too short then? This book is a result of his work to answer some of those questions about choosing springs. It provides a methodology whereby answers can be found by using a set of look-up tables. It’s a solution intended for the use of clock repairmen at their bench to find those answers with a minimum of time and effort needed for any given clock in front of them.

Historian and photographer Richard Hansen has been doing 1906 photographic shows since 1970. He cofounded the website sfmuseum.org, which covers San Francisco history with a focus on the earthquake and fire of 1906, with David Fowler in 1990. The website is also home to the great register covering those who perished in 1906, compiled by Gladys Hansen, city archivist emerita of San Francisco.