Westclox Big Ben alarm clock

While I was home over the holidays, one of the things I did was help my mom and uncle sort out and pack up my grandma's stuff, since she's moving in with my uncle. It was a big job, since Grandma's sort of a packrat (so I guess I come by it honestly). I think we ended up finding about four clocks and at least three phones, not counting the ones actively in use. One of the clocks and two of the phones turned out to be broken, and I was there to intercept them on the way to the trashcan.

It's been probably close to ten years since I took an analog clock apart, and I don't think I've ever scrapped a wind-up clock. I guess part of that is because the vast majority of alarm clocks now are digital, and I never see wall clocks in the trash for whatever reason.

This particular clock had glow-in-the-dark hands and numbers, and it's old enough that there was a small but nonzero chance of them containing radium, so I didn't save them.

The face of the clock was just a piece of paperboard, so it came out fairly easily. Without the face, it sort of just looks like a little bucket of parts.

Here's the mechanism pried open. A lot of the parts didn't want to come out, but enough of them did that it wasn't a completely futile endeavour.

Not a bad trophy pile, though it might have looked more impressive if I had photographed the parts on a darker background.

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Housekeeping note: I'm thinking of going to only posting once a week, on Saturdays. That way, I have more of a buffer in the event that I don't find any new stuff for a while. But I haven't decided for sure yet. If I don't post on Wednesday, then I've gone to a weekly post schedule. Also, I'm still in the process of fixing the formatting, but it's boring work, so it might take a while to complete.