Troubleshooting

Sometimes a mechanism just doesn't want to run or strike correctly - despite pretty much everything looking like it should want to run. On those occasions I set up the mechanism, with its pendulum, on a bench next to my main bench and hook up both a beat amplifier (Time Trax), as well as a beat monitor (Bryan Mumford's Microset) that allows me to plot the beat and/or strikes on my computer monitor, which sits above my main bench. This gallery gives you an idea of how I set all this up.

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Viewing Microset Data in Excel

It is possible to import the data collected by the Microset into a program like Excel - where one can then create additional plots of the data. The plot above is significantly different from the plots in the previous pictures - the escapement is not as perfectly balanced between ticks and tocks - such that the longer duration does not alternate between the ticks and tocks. On this plot the number of ticks between the maximum difference between ticks and tocks is 60 beats, as compared to the 30 in the previous plots. Note too, the maximum difference between the tick and the tock is roughly 0.08 seconds, compared to the roughly 0.04 seconds in the previous example (with the beat more balanced). Given that the 0.04 seconds shifted between the tick being longer, and the tock being longer, hopefully you can see that the first plots were splitting the 0.08 total difference in half by adjusting the crutch so that the tick was sometimes longer, and sometimes the tock was longer.

Plot short term beat annotated