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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Impact of Increasing Weight - Before weight is added

I've added a couple more plots to expand the thought of changing the weight on a dead-beat escapement. This plot shows the month-duration mechanism that has been used for generating the previous plots with a 3 pound weight and with the crutch adjusted such that the beat cycled between being nearly even (0.76 seconds for both the tick and the tock) to having every other beat quite a bit longer (the tick was as much as just over 0.8 seconds longer).

Comparing with the previous plot where the beat was adjusted to make the longest ticks and tocks roughly equal (slide 7) shows that the difference between ticks and tocks on this slide is roughly twice when the escapement is very finely balanced.

pound before