Golden Hour Clock advice anyone?
 

Thanks to the thread about luminous radium clock hands, I stumbled across something I had not thought about in many years, Golden Hour clocks.

Now I want one. I recall as a kid in the '50s some of my parents friends we'd go to visit had one of these.

Anyone here know anything about these clocks? What to look for?

Plug it in to make sure the motor is still functioning. Not much to them. The motor rotates the glass and the weighted hour hand and gear set does the rest.

Replacement motors are available if necessary. I have one, and it belonged to my grandparents. It always held my fascination as a young child, so it is particularly sentimental to me. When my grandparents passed, I found it in my grandfather's workshop partially disassembled. It appeared that he was in the middle of trying to repair it, as its motor was shot. I took it to a local clock shop and the guy put a new motor in it & sold me a 2nd one for a spare.

I have one that works. The gear around the rim often breaks from what I've read.

And they have Radium on the hands and the numbers! I didn't know that before last week, mines been stashed away and hasn't been handled for years.

The radium on the Jefferson's is miniscule by comparison to the old Westclox key winds.

Using my old cold war Lionel geiger counter, I find the clock to be about 4x "hotter" (about 1200 counts per minute 2mR/hr) than the clock on my Zenith G516W "owl" clock radio, but rapidly decreases with distance.

If the clock runs slow, the perimeter gear has become detached from the glass face. The glass then rolls around inside of the gear shell, making for an amazingly consistant gear reduction. Drove me nutz before I figured that out!

jr

How brightly does yours glow? Mine hardly glows at all. It's from the late 40s or early 50s.

Mine is quite dim, although still radioactive (iirc the half of radium is around 1600 years, so levels are pretty much the same as when it was made)... although UV light will still excite the dead phosphor pretty well.

Makes a great "set topper" : http://www.videokarma.org/showpost.p...00&postcount=5
jr

Yep looks good!

Here's mine about 17 years ago.


http://videokarma.org/attachment.php...0&d=1494053732

Lovely... just a perfect 50s display.

jr

Quite nice, Eric! :yes:

Other than the motor what goes wrong with these?


Does the motor seize up or burn out, or both? Is it rebuildable?

Here is a well written history on the Jefferson clocks.
http://www.roger-russell.com/jeffers/jeffers.htm

the grease can get hard over time, that in turn causes issues with the gears. I think they can be taken apart and regreased. There are web pages about doing it, I think.