VOLUME 14             OCTOBER 1997                NUMBER  10

Radio Clock Repair

BY ROBERT G. WHEATON

From Antique Radio Classified
(Copyright 1997 by John V. Terrey - For personal use only.)

I recently acquired a nice General Electric Model 65 clock-radio and have successfully repaired the sluggish noisy clock with a technique I read about years ago. It might bear repeating for others now.

As received, the clock would not run. It responded to a light oiling of the various gear shafts, but behaved sluggishly and with a hopeless-sounding gnashing of gearworks inside the sealed unit of the Telechron motor.

Making appropriate notes to aid reassembly, I carefully removed the motor and magnetic field laminations from the rear of the clock. The sealed unit was separated from the field, and its drive shaft area cleaned of all dirt and grime.

Next, I put it in a preheated 250° oven for 15 minutes. Immediately upon its removal from the oven, I placed several droplets of light machine oil (M-10, a quality gun oil) at the shaft where it exits the bushing. On this particular Telechron a circular dam around the bushing retains the oil.

Heating the motor causes a slight vacuum to appear as it cools -- enough vacuum to pull the oil inside, right through the slight shaft-to-bushing clearance. Wow, what a clever idea someone came up with years ago!

After cooling, the motor should be placed in many different positions for several hours each to allow the oil to distribute itself on the gearworks inside. If only slight improvement is then noted, repeat the heating-oiling-distribution sequence.

As a point of reference, the field winding on my clock measured 5858 ohms. That's probably typical of what a "still good" field winding will measure.

(Robert Wheaton, 16015 White Fawn Dr., San Antonio, TX 78255)