They wind me up and let me go

A couple weeks ago we got our mantle clock back from repairs. I forget if they confirmed that it was getting stuck at 18 minutes after the hour because of grit in the gears but, c'mon, what else could it be? Anyway after some decent time-keeping and me fiddling with the fast/slow dial to try to get it just right again the clock ... stopped working.

I thought that I had over-wound it, and that the main spring needed to let off some energy to function safely again. So for a few days I gave the clock a little pendulum-launching nudge every time I passed, and burned off one or two minutes of too much power. This wasn't getting anywhere, though. And I learned that according to every horological site on the Internet, over-winding clocks is basically a myth. If you don't go at the winding mechanism with pliers you can't do it. I also learn that one full 360-degree turn of the key should be roughly 24 hours of timekeeping, which is obvious once you hear it but I didn't know. I knew I needed roughly 14 half-turns each week but didn't make the connection.

Anyway we still had the problem: it would, once started, run for a minute or two and stop. So, this morning I took the clock off the mantle and put it on the dining table with the intention of looking harder at it and seeing if I could find a gear with grit or something. To my surprise, the pendulum inside --- started by the jolt of being set on the table --- would not stop. Well, hypothetical grit jarred loose, then; great. I set it back on the mantle, gave it a starting shove and ... the clock stopped after a minute. OK; a fresh try and it ... stopped after a minute.

I took it back down and set it on the dining room table and what do you know but it ran without complaint. A couple times during my workday I took the perfectly-working clock and set it back on the mantle to see it stop again. And each time it stopped.

I did experiments. The clock would stop if set on the coffee table in the living room. It would not stop on the dining room table, even if two of the legs were on bunny_hugger's partly-assembled jigsaw puzzle and the other two were not. This should seem to confirm that the clock isn't that sensitive to being level, even if somehow the mantle that has been level enough for it for the past twelve years has somehow become too far out of true. That the clock stopped on the coffee table suggests the issue was not some unknown magnetic item on the mantle draining the pendulum of energy. And then ---

I set the clock on the mantle backwards, to see if I could see anything when it stopped. And it did not stop. It ran without complaint for hours, stopping only whenever I turned the clock around however gingerly. I even tried hanging the pendulum bob backwards in case that somehow made a difference, and it did not.

At this point my leading hypothesis is ghosts. That or the curse on bunny_hugger's computers has gone clockpunk. I don't know.

I did get the spirit level out and find that the mantle is, indeed, tipped a little backwards, that is, the wall end is a little lower than the front. Maybe the width of a hardcover book's cover. But it has always been like that --- we'd have seen the paint torn if it had fallen recently and one thing I know of fireplace mantles is they are not thrust faults. And yet ...

Well, I folded some paper towels up and stuffed them under the hind feet of the clock and it's run now for (touch wood) the length of my writing this post plus like two or three minutes. But again, this is the same place on the same mantle the clock has run fine on for a decade-plus. It is hard to ignore the compelling simplicity of the ghost/curse idea.

Trivia: In his briefing of the Senate the 23rd of May, 1973, NASA Administrator James C Fletcher estimated that because of the accident they would be unable to complete three of the planned 87 experiments. Source: Skylab: A Chronology, Roland W Newkirk, Ivan D Ertel, Courtney G Brooks. NASA SP-4011. (These were ones that required the airlock, which the replacement sunshade would use.)

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Surprise Supplement: Hamburger Sharks and Sea Spinach, Doc Winner. Editor Stephanie Noelle.