My good deed for the day

Sorry about the quality - hasty mobile phone diary shot.

Our church clock has been stopped for a couple of weeks following a mains failure. Not having had much luck with the service people, our neighbour asked me if I would take a look at the electrics as he had realised that was very likely where the problem was.

Bear in mind this is an 1880s clock,  driven by weights and intended to be hand wound every few days.  It is built like a tank, has lots of moving parts and no safety guards. There is also a mechanism to disable the hammers when the bells are being rung via the ropes, and it was converted to electric winding around 20 years ago.     After some poking about*  deciding the power supply was ok and me listening to Nick's explanation of what it did when working normally,  we took the covers off the control unit and found a 'set' button.  Pressed the button and the winder pulled the clock drive weight back up.    The clock rang the hour at 18:00 so it does look like we have fixed it.

Update: still ringing on time at 20:00 :-)

A new battery next week and it should be good for a few more years.

*Poking about is an engineering term for looking at a system I don't really understand  while trying not to make it any worse than it already is.