clocks (was Re: Fwd: undeliverable mail)

[Greg Merritt <gregm@engin.umich.edu>]

At 7:12 AM -0000 1/12/97, Eileenis@aol.com wrote:
>is anyone else's clock broken? i cannot get mine to work.


	The clock in your '72 is probably a transistor-based clock, but
just in case, here's how I fixed a common failure on the auto-winding
mechanical clock from my '71.  (From the T3 web pages.)


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One day the clock in my squareback quit working. I'd been given a spare
when I bought the car, and obtained another from a car I parted out.
Neither of these worked, either. One of the spares had a metal cover on the
back, held on with two small slot head screws. The manufacture date on the
clock was 7/71. I took off the cover and found a small assortment of
plastic gears, a rotational oscillator (driven electromagnetically), and a
transitor, capacitor & 3 resistors. Not terribly complicated, but... let's
have a look at the other one. It had a plastic rear cover, but an earlier
date stamped on it. (It's installed in my car right now; my other example
of this type is dated 3/71.) The cover is held on by three nuts, one of
which is covered by what appears to be a plastic anti-tamper seal. (Pliers
took care of that...) Removing the cover revealed a bunch of neat-looking
metal gears... it was nothing more than a mechanical wind-up clock with an
electric winder! When it winds down every couple of minutes, a contact
closes (part of the winding down action) and a solenoid is energized. The
solenoid flies forward, "instantly" winding up the clock for the next few
minutes. You hear it go "clunk" periodically if you sit in the car with the
engine off. It turns out that there's a small internal fuse built into the
clock; mine had blown. (Somebody on r.a.vw pointed this out to me. It was
years ago, and I've forgotten who it was!) It appeared as though the fuse
was simply a very thin wire. I soldered a new wire in its place, and it
worked great! I should have lubricated it when I had it apart, though. It
runs slow here in the winter (average January temperature is below
freezing), just about right in spring and fall, and a little fast in the
summer if I don't pop it out and adjust the speed for the season. I just
think of it as a combination thermometer/chronometer. :-)
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-Greg
'71 squareback
'63 Beetle