Canuck 289 scratch build

[old willy]

Hello all,

Thanks so much for your kind words, work continues but for now I thought I would post another quick update.

A bit of a side project really but still needed.

Awhile back I bought a nice looking Smiths clock for the project, while not 100 percent correct it was much closer looking than what I was seeing in the new Smith’s range.
The seller said / thought it was working and I didn’t really know anything about the inner workings of old Smiths electric dash clocks. I thought, perhaps it would just need a clean and lube and …….



Well it turns out this vintage of Smiths clock is a bit of an orphan. The earlier CE type clocks can be repaired with a new circuit board that some clever fellow is selling to replace a contact point system they had but alas this is the later CTE type and had a strange transistorized pulsing electromagnet type drive that powered a balance wheel set between 2 permanent magnets then driving a cheap plastic clockwork.
From what I read (after the fact ) they were not very robust and mostly just failed in short order. The laminated balance assembly with the magnet windings falls apart and sadly there really is no fix for that.

So it goes without saying that of course my clock did not work and upon inspection the balance was the issue and honestly I would say I was not the first person to have checked so………

But you don’t know, what you don’t know, I guess. Buyer beware? or advice along those lines...

I figured my best answer was to remove the internals and figure out how to mount the dial and hopefully the hands onto a modern quartz movement and try and make it all fit. I am certainly not the first person to think of this, many old wall and mantle clocks get resurrected this way.

There are a lot of dash clock options available so I found one that looked compact enough, was good quality and was reasonably priced too as it was not going to survive this process either way. I have never heard of KUS brand of gauges before and they seem to be marketed to the marine industry.



It is a well-made item and sealed for marine use, this also means it has a remote mounted button for adjusting the time which I think turned out to be a bonus.

So first I took the old Smiths clock apart, all I really needed was the main case, dial, hands, crystal and knobs.



Then I opened the KUS clock and removed it’s inner workings .



So it is a quartz oscillator type circuit driving a small motor for the hands, the setting is accomplished by somehow driving the motor into hyper speed, whipping the hands around until the time is correct….cool

I cut some scrap styrene to make spacers to support the new drive unit in relation to the dial and then the correct depth in the case, using the same screws that held the old Smiths guts in place. Trust me this was much easier said than done, but it fits.





I was able to resize the Smiths hands to fit the new shafts too to help keep the original look although the KUS hands would have been somewhat OK too.

I made some cut outs to let the light around the dial as the old smiths one did and then found a fairly small momentary contact switch in my electronics junk collection and was able to make the old setting knob function as the new setting button. The old regulation screw was added for looks but that’s all it does now.



So time to test it, I hooked it up to a power supply and let it run for a day.



So happy with that result I gave it a last dusting and closed the case up.




I think in the end it looks pretty good and should be right at home in the dash with the other new Smiths gauges, I guess all their internals have been upgraded over time so why not this one too.

Till next time……..

Hudson