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Engineering
General Engineering
The 41 second clock failure syndrome
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[QUOTE="Baluncore, post: 6557870, member: 447632"] I have a similar clock, but I use 1.2V batteries that need to be recharged every 6 months or so. It keeps very good time, but it creeps ahead by about a minute per week when it needs a battery recharge. When the national News seems to start a minute of more late, I recharge the clock battery and correct it's time. I did not at first recognise the speedup prior to stopping on the 40 second hill climb, but now that I am watching for it, it gets recharged and so does not get to stop at 40 seconds anymore. It does still stop dead after several years, but not at 40 seconds, and recharging the battery does not fix it. I used to think that was end-of-life for the clock, but now I know it is due to the end-of-life for very small midges. [URL='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballooning_(spider)']Parachute spiders[/URL] wait for a warm day with a gentle breeze, usually the day after rain, then they climb trees and leap off, to be delicately spread across the face of the Earth. When a parachute spider escapes my family of tame [URL='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delena_cancerides']huntsman spiders[/URL], it may take up unsafe residence inside a poorly sealed space such as an electrical fitting, or my clock. It is amazing what you can see under a binocular operating microscope. The small spiders use the clock as a hunting lodge. Each time they foray, to bring back a midge, they grow in size and the midge's remnant skeletons build up in the clock, until the spider is too big to exit, when it sheds a last exoskeleton in the clock, before softly departing to seek it's destiny outside time. The accumulated hard exoskeletons of the predator and prey will in the end block the rotation of the seconds reduction gear train. That is when I remove the mechanism and carefully separate the two halves. Then I can blow out the fragments of exoskeletons left there by the young spider to chock the gears that kept it awake at night. [/QUOTE]
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The 41 second clock failure syndrome
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