Wednesday.

The two clocks illustrated here are the two clocks I have been working on today. Actually I started work on the wall clock shown above yesterday evening.  I stripped it down completely, found the problem, then left it overnight, solved the problem, and put the clock back together this morning, since when it's been behaving itself perfectly. It is a typical English fusee wall clock, with a twelve inch dial. It lives in a large kitchen and hangs right over the Aga, which had caused the clock oil to more or less solidify. I'm going to have to persuade the clock owner to relocate the clock to somewhere more suitable (hopefully still in the kitchen).

The long case clock illustrated above and below started life in around 1820, and was made by Thomas Dickinson of Boston (the Lincolnshire one, not the American one).  I found it in a dry garden shed in Ely in 1978/9, purchased  it, and took it home, where Ann fell in love with it. I cleaned it, and it's been going and keeping reasonably good time ever since then; until I found a few weeks ago that all the glue in the case had dried out alarmingly, so that the clock had become quite shaky in its old age. I think this was probably due to the clock having lived in centrally heated homes for the last few years. This time I took the case to a friend of mine, a furniture restorer near Cambridge. He's done a good, sound job on the case, and this afternoon I did the few necessary repairs on the movement, and put it all back together. It's now running well again. Mell, the furniture restorer, told me he'd never before noticed a long case clock with only two feet to the base. I told him that it's fairly unusual, but I've had several through my hands over the years, and that it is a good practical design, in that with two front feet only, the clock case is braced firmly against the wall behind it. The few that I've noticed all dated from around the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

It's a rather attractive clock, and it's good to have it going again. We've both rather missed it.