Thanks John. I turned a very small vee notch on the inside to both mark the cut out depth and also to help turn the tabs in. You can just about see the mark on the inside of the tabs by my fingers. I would have preferred to mill the notches but was worried that the material was too thin so I cut them out roughly with a piercing saw and then put a disc of plywood on the inside to act as a guide for a file. Incidentally the photo of the bezel on my hand is taken before plating. I got a fairly good finish from the lathe and then transferred the "chuck" to a polishing head. For the eagle eyed there is a thread in the body of the chuck to pull the wedge down and a larger thread in the wedge itself to push it back out again. Quite ridiculous how much time we happily put into our hobbies! Colin
Yes, time is of no essence when you're not on the clock. Won't bending the tabs be risky with billet material? john
My first thoughts had been to make a replacement from sheet material either by pressing or spinning, but there would almost certainly have been quite a bit of trial and error before I perfected the technique. As I only wanted one bezel it seemed safer just to turn it. If I did it again I would probably use brass rather than steel, but hey, it worked.
Update. So I picked-up a “dead” Daytona clock as a spare (hoping I could rehab it). Turned out that the internals were actually in better shape than my original, and a little cleaning and oiling had it running fine (been running on my desk for a couple of months now). But here is the new bit of info. There was a feature working on this clock that did *not* work on my original. Basically, when you pull-out the adjustment knob (*all* the way out, as far as it will go), an electrical contact is made that will pull the rotor into the right position so that the clock will now start to run (after you release the knob). This most decidedly was not working on my original clock, so it was really important that the clock not be able to stop in a position where it would not be able to restart (and it took a lot of tweaking to get it that way). So I opened-up my original again, and found that the contacts that provide this function were oxidized. Cleaned the contacts up, and voila, feature works as intended. Interestingly, if you look at the instructions on the Veglia tag, they sort of imply that this feature exists. They are just not super explicit about the fact that you may *have* to pull-out the knob, or the clock might not start running. I wonder how many clocks have been “repaired”, or (shudder) binned, when all they needed was a good pull on the time-adjustment knob? Yikes...
Hi Timo @TTR, I was having issues with my clock in my 330 GTC. I took it up to North Hollywood Speedometer. They found it had an unknown electronic movement with oddball wiring. Ralph told me that he put in an new electronic movement. The second hand has the quick movement that I understand is how the mechanical movement works. And it actually keeps time! The clock face says Veglia - so if it looks like and operates like original, who's to know without taking the clock out?
The 330 GTCs have the same model of clock as the Daytonas. The mechanical movement in these clocks have the second hand advancing twice every second, and for each advancing of the hand, there are two “tick” sound; so “tick-tick-tick-tick” every second. If NHS put in a movement from one of the “electtronico” Veglia clocks, the second hand moves the same way, because the internal mechanism is actually very similar. Those clocks are only “electronic” in that they use a transistor circuit to turn the magnets on and off, rather than a little mechanical “brush”.