Maureen Dillon book was an excellent Christmas read. Up until the 1920's electricity in the U.K. Was supplied by 100's of Companies or privately generated, either AC or DC, varying voltages. Houses

Thanks for this information Brook. At least one of those patents, '279a, seems to describe something like this though whether it is the original patent or an improvement I haven't worked out yet.

Hi Don: This might help: https://prc68.com/I/QuartzClk.shtml includes links to a number of patents. -- Have Fun, Brooke

Every time I hear about quartz clocks I think of the pair of 60mm, cube-format, "Rhythm" alarm clocks we bought probably in the early 1970s. They have run without a moment's hesitation, except for

John, I was curious about that too so I bought a Seiko sweep second hand wall clock. I much prefer it to the traditional once-a-second ticking style. It's also very quiet so it's a delight to both

Aha! Thanks for that, I thought it would have to be a stepper o0f some sort, obviously a more advanced version of the Lavet style motor. Bepi, sorry my question wasn't clear, I meant the type of

I have one of those movements and it is actually a stepper just like the ordinary quartz movement but it has 8 times as many steps. You can drive it in the same way as you drive the regular quartz

Wouldn't microstepping be enough? -- Bepi

The one I had in the late nineties had a gear wheel with loads of angled projections on and this was driven by a tiny tuning fork attached to a coil. From memory the fork vibrated and these vibrations

A bit off topic, but please could anyone link me to a decent explanation of how these quartz clock movements with continuous sweep seconds work? I assume that they have some sort of stepper motor with

This makes more sense, that perhaps the friction between the minute hand and some other element changes as a function of position. Could you check to see if that is the case? Then we still have to

The minute hand is certainly not balanced by itself (and neither is the hour hand) (dial photograph in the first message in the thread). There is a friction drive to the minute hand with nothing

It could be that the hands are unbalanced, the balancing being done on the minute gear wheel as some older gent's clocks are. This would mean that after removal of the hands, the minute wheel would

This is interesting. It is not clear how this could happen. How heavy are the hands, and are they balanced? If the error arises somehow from a gravitational torque on the hands, we would expect

That is absolutely amazing. How do you account for it? But glancing at your graph I would hazard a guess that it is showing that though the rate - hour to hour- is less variable without the hands,

I removed the hands over the weekend, and the difference is absolutely clear: So it really is related to the position of the hands..... Philip

Again not a suggestion for the looks but one day you might want to control the temperature of your clock with one of those extra cheap controllers like this 2.99 one: XH-W1209. I did once something

Thanks! Harvey

This is a not very good photo of the case I made for my Arduino-controlled version. Material is a high-spec version of MDF called Valchromat which uses a melamine resin making it harder, stronger,

Thanks. That is an interesting result you got. I am pretty unconstrained on the design, so I can surely do that. Best, Harvey