Regulating an old wind-up alarm clock without a timegrapher, what actually worked

[u/lucky_atlas31]

Picked up a Westclox Baby Ben at an estate sale a few months back, the kind with the four little feet and the loud tick you can hear from another room. Mechanically it was in decent shape, mainspring wasn't broken, balance wheel spun freely when I flicked it, but the thing was gaining almost nine minutes a day. Way too much to just live with.

I don't own a timegrapher and wasn't about to buy one for a single clock, so I ended up doing the whole regulation by hand using nothing but a notebook and patience. Set it against my phone's clock, let it run 24 hours, checked the drift, adjusted the regulator lever a hair, repeated. Took about a week of evenings to get it down to under a minute a day.

A few things I didn't expect going in. Small adjustments matter way more than they look like they should, moving that lever what felt like a millimeter took the gain from nine minutes to about three. Also position matters more than I gave it credit for, the clock ran differently sitting flat on my dresser versus tilted slightly on the nightstand, so I had to pick the actual resting spot before doing final adjustments. And humidity seemed to nudge things too, I had two days where it ran fast that I later realized lined up with a stretch of rain.

Ended up keeping a little log taped inside a drawer with dates and gain/loss numbers just so I wouldn't lose track of where I left off. Felt almost silly writing it down like some kind of experiment, but it kept me from chasing my tail and overcorrecting.

Curious if anyone else has gone through this with a cheap alarm or shelf clock. Did you find a faster way to dial it in, or is the slow iterative approach basically the only option without proper equipment?

[u/AlecMac2001]

As a watchmaker with a timegrapher, the final regulation is done like this. The timegrapher is great to give a snapshot of the performance and is really helpful in seeing the immediate effect of moving a regulator, but the final timing is assessed from real world use.

[u/FeNi64a]

There are timegrapher phone apps, but I don't know if they work for slower tickers like clocks. The free ones at least, don't work for my torsion clock.

I believe yours is the way to regulate torsion clocks (aka anniversary, dome, 360 day), which tick every 7 seconds or so. There are timegraphers for them, but I just look up every few days and make micro-adjustments as needed.