Ticking Along Two

Fate and luck can play some funny tricks. A few weeks ago I put up a post titled Ticking Along where I highlighted some small communication center clocks that only rarely pop up on eBay. How rare? A few years between sightings, at least. Or so I thought.

Within a day of putting up my post, I was surprised to get a hit on one of my eBay searches for a Franklin comms center clock. It was used, but the seller stated that it ran. The price was good (he accepted a low-ish offer), and it was mine. It arrived a few days ago and is in pretty good shape. If there hadn't been any scratches on the plastic crystal, I would have thought it was brand new. 

The clock runs fine, as good as its two siblings (it uses a Kienzle movement from Germany, like the other Franklin clock), and some plastic polish took care of most of the scratches and haze on the crystal. I'm tickled pink to have three good examples of these clocks. I think I can stop searching now... but I won't 😄.

The new clock is in the center. In front is a 42mm Seiko solar quartz wristwatch movement
that also does duty as a station clock. The Seiko is, hands down, one of the most consistently
accurate movements I own - +/- 1 second per month.

My communications center clock obsession started years ago, and I wrote about in a 2022 post titled Message Center Clocks. The US message center clocks I highlight in that post are actually fairly common, and several can be found on eBay on any given day. Since the Army was buying these right up into the 1970's, they are not particularly rare. But they are large - 6" & 8" dial faces - and as they use mechanical movements, they need regular service and adjustment.

At the opposite end are the brilliantly designed and executed German WWII-era communication center clocks. I'd argue that these smaller clocks were better suited to a mobile communications setup - they were easy to pack away, could stand by themselves or be hung on a wall, and the clock movements didn't require a key - there was a large winding wheel on the back of the movement. Interestingly, a lot of the movements for these clocks were manufactured by Keinzle, the same company that made the quartz movements in my clocks.

This design was so successful that it stayed on production well beyond WWII, and the newly constituted West German army & air force started buying them again in the 1950s.

If some enterprising manufacturer started making copies of this clock, but with a quartz movement, I'd be first in-line yelling, "Take my money!"

W8BYH out