The clock was often pretty far from showing the correct time, with the bells ringing a minute or two away from the top of the hour, and it occurred to me to start monitoring the time error. After a bit of thought, I came up with a way of getting very precise measurements of the clock's time offset:
Using a digital sound recorder, I recorded shortwave time signals leading up to the top of the hour. When the bells were due to ring, I turned the recorder towards my deck, which has a line-of-sight view of the church tower (through a few trees). Then back to the shortwave for more time signals.
I would then open the recording in sound editing software (CoolEdit):
Switching the view to waveform mode and zooming in makes it possible to set the selection endpoints very precisely:
Packrat that I am, I started collecting data... Here's the result of the first week of measurements:
The tiny plus signs in the graph are the individual timing measurements, and the red line is a least-squares fit to the data. The clock is running quite fast, gaining about 27 seconds per day, but the speed is surprisingly stable. Two months later, after an adjustment to the clock's speed control and the advent of colder weather, the clock was losing time but was running much closer to the correct speed, falling behind by about 4 seconds per day:
Another week's measurement showed an interesting pattern that was seen repeatedly:
I thought about it, then remembered that Collin described how the timekeeping cable spool should be wound so the cable filled the width of the spool, and then wound a bit more so that there were two turns in a second layer of cable. I realized that this second layer, being farther away from the center of the drum, causes the weights to exert more torque on the drum due to the extra leverage. So if the timekeeping drum is wound with a second layer, the clock will run noticeably faster for a couple of turns of the drum than it does the rest of the time.
In 2019, I got to meet David Grof, master clock mechanic, who brought the Haydenville clock back into working order in 2008 after a period of disrepair. He asked me if I thought the clock ran faster or slower in cold weather. Former physics student that I am, I replied that the pendulum would shrink in cold weather, causing it to swing more rapidly, so I guessed the clock would run faster. David replied that it was just the opposite: The pendulum, being made of wood, shrinks very little, and the clock is actually engaged in a battle of friction vs. torque. In the winter, the oil lubricating the escapement mechanism gets thicker and provides more resistance, and this slows the clock down.
This temperature-sensitive battle between friction and torque is beautifully illustrated in the time-error graph for the data I collected during 2019:
The discontinuous jumps in the graph above are from the clock time being reset. Positive values on the y-axis indicate that the clock is ringing too early and negative values that it's ringing too late. With this convention, an upward slope means the clock is gaining time (running too fast), and a downward slope means it's losing time, running slow.
Producing the graphs as I was doing it in 2019 was laborious, and they had to be emailed to Collin for them to serve any useful purpose. I didn't keep this up for very long, but I kept making daily recordings of the clock through 2022 and squirreled the recordings away on my computer's hard drive.
Years later, I learned how to make graphs in Google Sheets — graphs that could be seen by anyone simply by following a web link. When the bells started ringing again in 2026 after a period of inactivity, I once again started collecting timing data. This time, though, I put the data in a Google spreadsheet with a graph that was automatically updated every time I added a new measurement. (You can see the spreadsheet here: HCC Clock Time Error.) This makes the most recent speed graph available, via smartphone, to the clock-minder when they're up in the tower winding the clock. Something like this:
Unfortunately, the bells have once again stopped ringing. Stay tuned, hopefully, for live data when bell-ringing resumes.
A sad note: I recorded shortwave time signals from the Canadian time station CHU, transmitting from Ottawa and receivable round-the-clock from Western Massachusetts. When the bells started ringing again on June 24, 2026, for some reason CHU wasn't coming in on the shortwave. I thought radio propagation was unusually bad, but I couldn't find it on any frequency at any time of day. I finally Googled CHU and learned that, after 100 years on the air, it had been decommissioned on June 22! (The recording above is now a historic relic, a souvenir of time gone by.) With CHU off the air, I have to use the U.S. time station WWV, located in Fort Collins, Colorado, for time signals. Being so far away, WWV's signal comes in only late at night until early in the morning — which turns out to be a problem because the town may be planning on silencing the bells at night, just when I've got live clock-monitoring in place, d'oh...
Further Reading
About Radio Station CHU
National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors
- an online group that discusses old mechanical clocks, including tower clocks
Timekeeping fanatic Tom Van Baak's site:
http://leapsecond.com
His powerpoint presentation on Extreme Amateur Timekeeping is a fun read:
http://leapsecond.com/nawcc2013/tvb-2013-Extreme-Amateur-Timekeeping.ppt.pdf
