Converting the Magnette's Clock to Quartz

For years I have had a small quartz 3.5 cm diameter clock set into an ancient piece of polished Australian redgum sitting on my desk.  My children gave it to me as a birthday present one significant year.  I had often thought that the little clock looked about the right size to fit into a Magnette clock housing, so when I was at a woodworking exhibition recently, I bought just the clock part from a stand at the show for only $10.  The woodworkers buy such clocks in their hundreds and fit them into all sorts of woody things.   

I can report that it does fit into the Magnette.  This is how:  once you have pulled the new one apart, you can pop the hands off in the usual way (pull them up and they slide off their spindles) and get the mechanism out.  After grinding away some of the back of the original Magnette clock face, you can then glue the mechanism to it and refit the hands.  Simple.  But...

 The original face is too thick for the delicate new clock, so you have to thin it down a bit from the back which I did using a Dremel tool with a grinding stone on it.  If you look closely at the photos, you can see the circular area in the centre of the back of the Magnette face where I have ground away about half a mm of plastic before glueing the new mechanism on.  Be very careful not to grind too much away and have the face disintegrate on you.  I erred on the side of caution as you can actually bend the new hands too a bit to compensate for the extra thickness of the face.  I painted the new hands with white paint with a touch of green in it, mixed to match the original colour of the luminescent finish.

 When you reassemble the housing, you will need a small block of wood and a couple of rubber pads to fill up the space inside the housing left by the old mechanical workings.  You need these to hold the face firmly against the glass.  Drill a hole in the wood block and screw in the old hand setting knob so it all looks original.  This will unscrew from your old original workings using a small spanner.

 Note that I have taped up the cardboard light surround as it was letting light shine everywhere except on the face of the clock.  I love the green light on all the Magnette instruments and it was worth fiddling with the light cover to get the light to shine only on the clock face.  It looks gorgeous now.

 The only disadvantage that I can see, apart from the hands being a bit slimmer than on the original electro-mechanical clock, is that you have to pull the whole thing apart to reset the clock for daylight saving (summer time) changes and to change the battery.  Oh yes, when you refit the clock into the car, don't forget to make sure the original power wire is taped up - you don't want it shorting out inside your roof somewhere.

Malcolm Robertson
October 2008