posted on Monday, May 16th, 2005 at 2:04 pm and filed under General - comments feed | leave a comment | trackback url

Sad followup to this article can be found here.

It's only taken a year, but I've done it: I can now tell you the exact time of day — simply by looking at the clock in my 1800's dashboard!

If this doesn't sound like a feat to you, you obviously haven't ridden in a Volvo 1800 in the past few years. The fact is, a good, running clock is a rarity in the 1800 world, and even those lucky enough to have original, working models will tell you they often lose a few minutes a day even when they're working well.

But mine works now, and it keeps great time, and it only cost me $4 to get it that way. And it still says "Smiths" on it.

How?

Simple. I cheated:

I'm really not after a prize-winning, all-original car; I simply want a great-condition, great-running, comfortable car, so I don't mind taking liberties so long as it doesn't "crap up" the car itself. Removing the original, never-quite-accurate, internals of the clock and replacing them with a more reliable, cheap-but-working mechanism from a $3 alarm clock and a little voltage dampening is — in my book — perfectly acceptable. The clock looks and feels like the old one, it just isn't the same inside.

If anybody wants pictures/schematics, let me know, and I'll post 'em here.