Posted 6 years ago
ClockPop
(4 items)
This clock may not be one of the most fancy or ornate clocks in my vintage collection, but it just may be one of the more unique clocks that I have.
It is a 100 day anniversary style clock that was made in Japan to compete with the more expensive German made 400 day clocks of the time. It was first released in 1957 and had continued production to approximately 1973. The interesting thing that I noticed during cleaning and servicing was that the main spring and housing (barrel) is riveted onto the back plate and is not designed to be removed and serviced. It must have been less expensive to produce this way and it reminded me of the design used to power the inexpense tin litho wind up toys that were mass produced in post war Japan.
Since the main spring is not serviceable, I cleaned and polished everything I could and reassembled it with a new suspension spring. It looked nice but did not work for more then 20 minutes at a time. I took it apart again to look for the cause and quickly realized it was not getting enough power from the main spring. Upon closer inspection I found the gear attached to the main spring assembly was press fit onto the arbor. (Very unusual!) This was causing a huge amount of friction and resistance in the main spring assembly. I cleaned and oiled the friction point best as possible and now the clock runs flawlessly.
During my research on this model I found a few comments stating that the original owners were never able to get these clocks running from day one. Now I know why!
This was built and designed to be produced at a very low cost which leads me to believe there are not many survivors out there that are in running condition.
There is one other thing that makes this clock unique, it is stamped with the city within which it was manufactured, Tokyo Japan. The more expensive Nisshin 400 day models are only stamped made in Japan. I have no idea why only the 100 day model was stamped differently. An oddity for sure.