An early 20th century ‘Jockele’ clock

Early in 2020 I purchased a small Black Forest clock I was interested in on eBay. The seller also offered another ‘derelict’ movement with it. This movement was only 8cm high, was missing case parts, but it had wooden clock plates and this intrigued me

 

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The package arrived a couple of days later.

The movement was clearly a write-off… or was it?

It was obviously a clock originating from the

Black Forest, and a bit of reading and internet

research produced the name

‘Jockele clock’ for clocks with this type of small

movement with wooden clock plates. The earliest

Jockele clocks were produced in the 1790s, had

wooden arbors, and there are a number of

different train layouts. More reading

produced a photograph of a page of an American

clock catalogue, published in 1904,

where the particular design of clock I had bought

was illustrated.

 

By this time the clock was in pieces on the workbench, and although the trundles of the lantern pinions were rusted through in some cases, the wheel and collet work was brass, the arbors could be cleaned, the pivots had been partially protected by residues of the original lubricant, and the working faces of the pallets were in quite good order. There was some serious woodworm damage (residents long departed!) and missing casework… but now I knew what the missing cresting on the case should look like.

 

I had to replace all the original brass plate bushes and put six new trundles into each of the two pinions. I bought a piece of lime wood and cut, and carved, the new cresting, made a new cover for the top of the movement from a piece of brass shim, and made two new side doors to keep the dust out (just like the side doors of larger Black Forest ‘schild’ clocks, but on a miniature scale). I bought a modern 62 links per foot weight chain, and made a 200 gram, lead filled, brass weight (though the original was almost certainly a cast iron ‘pine cone’ weight).

 

I now have a delightful new addition to our hall wall and, with a total height of just 17 centimetres, it’s so small, my wife barely knows there is another clock in the house!