Opens at 9:00 for setup and mart. Craig White Will give a demonstration on re-silvering dials beginning at 10:00 during the mart. Mike Dempsy will give the second part of his balance staff and hairspring replacement in March.   Educational talk at 11:00 by Craig White entitled “Restoring a Scottish Musical Tall Case Clock”

We also need a new secretary.  The main job is just to put this newsletter together.  Please offer to help so no one is overburdened, only takes around an hour per meeting.

We have some demonstrations planed for upcoming meetings as follows
Jan – Resilver dials (White)
Mar – Balance staff and hairspring replacement, part 2 (Dempsey)

Thank you, Mike, for giving your PowerPoint talk on Mainsprings.  He suggested this is the first tool you should buy when getting into clock repair.  There is a lot of potential energy stored in a mainspring.  This energy needs to be let down in a controlled manner to avoid personal injury and damage to the clock.  Cleaning and examining the mainspring is important when servicing a clock.  The spring needs to be free of any cracks and clean and lubricated with horological mainspring oil.

Craig White gave an overview of his recent AHS tour in Netherlands and a stop in Wales, intitled “Horological Finds in Europe.”  Photos of a couple of rotisseries powered by clock works were shown.  A dog powered wheel was shown for rotating meat during cooking.  This was a special dog breed now extinct.

But in 1793, the French smashed the old clock system in favor of French Revolutionary Time, which was a 10-hour day, with 100 minutes per hour, and 100 seconds per minute. This thoroughly modern system had a few practical benefits, chief among them being a simplified way to do time-related math. If we want to know when a day is 80% complete, decimal time simply says “at the end of the eighth hour,” whereas standard time requires us to say “at 19 hours, 12 minutes.” French Revolutionary Time was a more elegant solution to that math problem. The problem was that every living person already had a well-established way of telling the time, and old habits die hard!

The system proved unpopular. People were unfamiliar with switching systems of time, and there were few practical reasons for non-mathematicians to change how they told time. (The same could not be said of the metric system of weights and measurements, which helped to standardize commerce; weights and measurements often differed in neighboring countries, but clocks generally did not.) Furthermore, replacing every clock and watch in the country was an expensive proposition. The French officially stopped using decimal time after just 17 months. French Revolutionary Time became non-mandatory starting on April 7, 1795. This did not stop some areas of the country from continuing to observe decimal time, and a few decimal clocks remained in use for years afterwards, presumably leading to many missed appointments!