A good screw just isn't enough-it must oscillate!

[hls30.com]

Bill,

Thanks for the link, I contacted them, but they said their entire inventory for the next year was bought by a CJ major from Vilonia:finger: !

Will

payback for not letting your "Breats and Thights" fetish alone? Try again!:laugh:

[hls30.com]

Jack,

It sounds like yours is intermident, and could be repaired. I suggest you contact Zclocks and see what he has to say. He has noted that each of the rally clocks he has seen are different, but a bad connection is all it sounds like is wrong with yours. In terms of repairing yours, he is who I would send it to. I would send both the clock and the oscillator, so he could clean and lub the clock and verify a complete working assembly.

Will

[Fun_in_my_z]

Damn i need to move.....

[hls30.com]

Just be sure to leave a forwarding address with the post office for all of those brown paper wrapped packages...

Will

[hls30.com]

Naked Oscillator!

This morning I received a broken Oscillator in the mail.

Here is the progress on it!

I have stopped at the point that I need to hunt down and clean my desoldering station-despite my enthusiasm!

I don't want to create an issue from using the wrong tool, or have to stop again while I look for it, so I am parked until I find the right box and service its contents!

Will

[ChrisA]

MMMM....printed circuits!! Will, we need a picture of the underside of that board! STAT!!!!

I love stuff like this!

Chris

[hls30.com]

Chris,

Rather than possibly pull something out(the board is secured to three brass spacer posts that are swagged to the case by a combination of E clips and solder, but it looks like there is only one item that I could not readily identify as a resistor, Cap, or Transistor. All of the pieces I can see are typically identified with color code or printing!

Other than the one oddity, there does not seem to be anything that will stop this from happening-though I DO RESERVE THE RIGHT TO BE WRONG ABOUT THAT!

Trust me Chis, You don't want to dig into this any more than I do!

But as this is not mine, I won't risk doing further damage to something that someone was kind enough to loan me/us!

Will

[ChrisA]

But as this is not mine, I won't risk doing further damage to something that someone was kind enough to loan me/us!

Will

Perfectly understandable. Without permission I wouldnt want to surgically damage the unobtanium organ.

Chris

[Victor Laury]

I have a ralley clock and no oscilator. I've been waiting for someone to find an inop one and perform reverse engineering. I wil help fund such a venture for the renumeration of a working unit!!

[hls30.com]

I'm narrowing in on what goes on in the clock circuit. It definitely looks like the oscillator is an AC converter.

Will

[74FAIRLADYZ]

I have the same clock and I believe my oscillator is bad. Please keep us posted on your progress. Just out of curiousity, has anyone used this company? http://clocksandgauges.com/

I contacted them today.

Travis

[hls30.com]

I have called them, and will be sending out some hires pics and a copy of the patent used for the mechanism this evening.

If these guys can come up with a quartz driven replacement for the motor(And I am reasonably sure I could with time) then turning the Rally clock into a stand alone unit will not be that tough. With the info from the patent, and access to the replacement drive units these guys use, the answer is probably only days away instead of months! The one trade off appears to be the conversion will give a constant motion second hand instead of the flick motion the clock has as delivered from Nissan.

If you are interested...

The readers digest version of the first patent of the technology used in the clock, and an abreviated history of the watch technology it came from.

The oscilator is a driven tuning fork that is adjustable, and used to establish and hold an extreemly accurate(for 1970) timing pulse. one side to fork is driven and the other side is sensed and converted into AC to drive an ac motor at the specific timing(a precursor to a stepper motor if you will)

Using a tuning fork tuned to 360hz gave an extreemly accurate, and more importantly, shock proof mechanism that was well suited for the beating it would take in the rally car environment.

This technology was used by Citizen as a result of a then pending buyin from Bulova in 1970. The clock is a direct progression of the technology used in the original Bulova Accutron and the Citizen Hi-Sonic series of watches.

My original thought was replace the motor with a current equivalent to both the driver(osciillator) and the stepper(ac Motor) and that is all there is looks to be dead on!

I'll keep everyone up to date.

Will