4/5/2023 0 Comments Western union splice![]() Is the minute hand at 12 or ahead or behind it? If it's right on 12, as it should be, the problem could be regulation. One question to answer is where the minute hand locks when synchronization occurs. With the cover and hands and dial off, you can push the arm down yourself – when you're close to the top of the hour – and see how it works. They seem to have been matched to the movements. Most of the minute hands are not adjustable, like those in most common clocks, and are pinned to their collars. This clamps down on a mating semicircular surface on the wheel behind it, and pretty positively locks the minute hand in position momentarily. If you look at the enlarged photo Toughtool posted, you can see a sort of downward-pointing "C"-shaped device on the arm behind the hour wheel. My recollection is that it can be as much as a couple of minutes plus or minus and still be brought in with the sync. The synchronizer simply brings the minute hand to 12 once an hour. You might want to leave the synchronizer turned off (or disconnected) for a while and see how the timekeeping is. You do not have one of the clocks with a sweep second hand, so not sure you can easily track any gain or loss in time over the course of the hour. When you say that when it adjusts, it moves the minute hand back a whole minute, there is, of course, the possibility that the clock has gained that much time in the course of the hour between synchronizations. Some of the clocks would wind often for a shorter time and some would wind longer for a greater time spread. The basic clock was a decent time keeper for the most part. W-U would come around about once a year and replace the batteries which required two #6 dry cell's per clock. As I recall they could sync if the clock was within a minute of so. The red light would come on as they synced up. They would send out the sync pulse which put 20 mA on the loop and as Long as someone had not cut the wires and killed the loop it would sync all the clocks at the top of the hour. I tried to obtain it when they finally went out of business but all I ended up with was a truck load of the wall clocks. The master clock was down the street in the Western Union Office and it was a thing of beauty. They were synchronized through a 20 Milliamp loop that went through several TV and Radio stations on the same street. The broadcast station I worked for in the late 1950's had them scattered about the studio building. I have had and worked on a ton of those Western Union Self Winding Clocks. Good luck, visit Ken's site, and best regards! The famous 4-sided clock in the middle of the information booth in Grand Central was a SWCC product, though my understanding is that it has been reworked, since the SWCC service is no longer available. At one time, as I recall, the entire NYC subway system was full of SWCC clocks. This was fed into the mixing board, so that you always got a time tone over the top of whatever program was running at the beginning of the hour.Ĭlocks like the one you have, without the sweep-second hand, were often found in public buildings. Some stations, I heard, used the synchronizing relay to actuate a 1000-cycle tone at the top of the hour. This was essential for scheduling, and especially for interacting with the network. In those days, if memory serves, we paid $6 per month per clock to have highly accurate time in the station. Western Union sent a guy out to replace the cells and check the operation of the clocks at regular intervals. The contact closure caused the synchronizing solenoids to pull and the red light above the numeral "6" to light up momentarily.Īll our clocks worked on two, 1.5v #6 cells, which were, as I recall, good for about 6 months or so. This relay provided a contact closure to all of our clocks. ![]() They sent a 90v AC ringer pulse down a phone line at the top of the hour to a relay housed in our phone wiring cabinet. (Announcers often said, "You can always make the clock wind itself by opening the mike.") By the late 1960s, Western Union was working with the phone company. Ours were the sweep-second type, with lots of largely ineffective soundproofing inside. When I worked in broadcasting, we had these in all the studios. ![]() If he doesn't know about it, it's probably not worth knowing. I am beginning to sound – to myself at least – like a broken record, but the foremost expert I know on these is Ken Reindel of
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