Clearning and reassembly of "La Duchesse"

Now that the pendulum has been replaced for "La Duchesse", it's time to clean and reassemble it.

The movement is a standard two-spring American movement with a count wheel striking mechanism.

Here's another few looks at the movement to make sure I didn't forget anything later upon reassembly!

After taking down the mainsprings (carefully held in place with wire), all of the wheels were removed and cleaned in the ultrasonic cleaner.  The plates were scrubbed with soap and water (avoiding any polishing of anything!) to get the old oil off.  At this point I noticed some interesting things: (1) there are no oil sinks to speak of, (2) there is only minor wear, most of the pivot holes pass the broach test outright, those that didn't were easily opened slightly to round, and (3) the mainsprings were apparently unlubricated.  I also took apart the mainsprings to inspect them -- they were essentially in mint condition.  Dimensions: 3/4" x 0.017" x didn't bother to measure. but they make about 9 full turns when winding

I polished all pivots by hand, using the lathe to hold everything steady.  (No power applied!)

Here are all of the parts cleaned and polished on the bench, ready for reassembly.

Movement reassembly was straightforward except that I had to take several tries to get the warning wheel in the right spot so that striking finished correctly.  Annoyingly, each try displaced all of the pivots, but it wasn't anything major.

The final repair was to fix the door hinge.  The pin was missing, so I made a replacement.  I suspect the original was brass, but I made a new one from steel.  It seems like someone had forced the door downward when it was opened, which cracked off the top hinge pipe on the dial.  I made a replacement one.  The original hinge was clearly soldered in place, but since the dial was painted with gold paint and ceramic, I didn't want to risk heating it.  So instead, I used some sturdy epoxy, which I think was reasonably unobtrusive.  I also had to re-broach the two original hinge pipes because they were warped off in a bad way.  (You can see that in the picture below to some extent.)  Even still, the door doesn't totally snap in place, but at least it closes.

And here is the assembled clock, sitting on my bench.  It's running now and just happily struck 11:00pm.  (However, I must protest Ansonia's choice of an incongruous kitchen-timer-sounding bell for this otherwise somewhat pretentious clock!)