I fixed my Quartz Clock!!

[whiz05403]

Newbie here and very excited that this killer site enabled me to fix my 87 911 quartz clock. The PO said it hasn't worked in the 6 years he had the car.

If I can do it so can you. I have never soldered anything in my life, luckily my neighbor had a solder kit, but he was leaving town and had no time to show me how to use it.

Pulling the clock was easy, comes right out. It took a few hours though to carefully pry off the cover holding on the glass. Might have been shorter but I was watching March Madness at the same time. SDSU lost

Next unscrew both screws on the back then unsolder the small bit from the back and out comes the clock.

I followed the other clock threads and unsoldered both capacitors, bought two new caps at Radio Shack for $1.50 each and soldered the new ones back in place making sure the neg and pos sides were correct. My soldering looked horrible!

After the soldering I took the clock to the car and hooked it up and it started to move!!

One thing to look out for is putting the thing back together. For me, leaving the final solder on the outside case as the very last thing worked best.

If anyone has any questions please fire away.

[nesslar]

LOL.
Had to chime in, though, because I fixed my clock by just spinning the hands around to the correct time and then releasing the stalk; 13 seconds work (estimate) max., works great. Good work.....by you I mean.
Edit: ...and yes, isn't it fun getting those "covers" off....gets easier next time 'round.

[Evans, Marv]

Don't know if the electric clocks would benefit from it or not, but I fixed my mechanical/electric clock by soldering the inside contacts together and putting an inline 3A fuse to the clock. The old clocks wind up a mechanical spring work and let it run down until it closes the contact at the end and rewinds until it opens the contact again and keeps on cycling. At the time I figured out the thing took 3 amps max to work.

[bfunke]

+1 on what Marv said. The original soldier is a very low temp eutectic solder that acts as a fuse. I suspect whatever you used will have a much higher melting point so you should add an inline fuse.