Since our Simplicity has run now for over twenty years, just for fun I calculated the number of times Simplicity has swung its pendulum in those two decades. I was amazed to find that this clock has ticked and tocked over 315 million times! That is a number that is almost too large to comprehend, and yet our Simplicity happily continues on with its daily duties without complaint.
Our Simplicity is as happy today as that day, twenty years ago, when I gave its pendulum the gentle push that stated this amazing journey. And, look closely at the picture, you'll see that our Simplicity shows no wear at all! But best of all, this clock has been completely trouble-free all that time. I don't recall my wonderful Simplicity ever giving me a single problem. I just wind it, and it runs. Looking at its wear patterns, I would estimate that it probably has another two or three hundred years before it begins to show any signs of its age. I'll check it in a couple hundred years and keep you posted.
For its first few years that Simplicity kept me company out in my shop where its beautiful song would be the first thing to greet me in the morning when I opened the shop doors. But out there with the constant Hawaiian trade winds to contend with, it would also be exposed to salty humidity and be constantly accumulating dust and, of course, be routinely covered in sawdust from my other woodworking activities. With that accumulation of humidity, salt, sawdust, at certain point, it would eventually stop ticking. I felt sorry for it. Having to put up with all that humidity, dirt and dust, must have been a challenge, however it never really complained. And the fix was so simple! With a few blasts of compressed air that beautiful Simplicity was ready to go out dancing once again.
Today that same Simplicity is featured as our living room clock, where it shares the opposite side of our fireplace mantle with the Zinnia. Simplicity and Zinnia make spectacularly beautiful fireplace finials.
Simplicity is the second clock that visitors see when they come into our home. The first clock visitors see is the Arts&Crafts in the foyer. The A&C is an electromagnetically impulsed clockworks. All of these mechanisms are such a delight!
As you probably have read in the Instructions sent with your plans, it is best to stop the pendulum each time that the clock is going to be rewound. This helps preserve the delicate pendulum, pallet adjustment. Then, once the clock is rewound, the pendulum can be restarted. After ten or eleven years of stopping that pendulum every time I rewound the Simplicity, I wanted to create a way to rewind the clock without having to stop and start the pendulum, and yet still allow the clock to maintaining the proper pendulum/pallet adjustment. My idea was to create a maintaining power arm that could be temporarily added to the large center wheel during the rewinding process...and it works beautifully! That Maintaining Power Arm now rests, along with the Speed-O-Key, on the shelf behind the Simplicity's center wheel. But I still have the original Simplicity key on display because it is such a beautiful showpiece of wood art.
If you have the Simplicity plans and would like to make a Maintaining Power Arm for your clock, simply email me a request and I'll be happy to send you the pdf.
I hope that you choose to build a Simplicity. I also hope that you enjoy living with your clock the next twenty or...maybe three hundred years.
After decades of building lamps, chairs, tables, bowls, cabinets, kitchen items, kinetic sculptures, automata, etc. I am convinced that these clocks are absolutely the VERY BEST way to spend time in the shop. I hope that you think so, too.
