I guess most of us who accept quartz CLOCK repairs tend to swap out a movement with a new one from UTS, Takane or Seiko etc. They're cheap and it's a quick and reliable solution. But sometimes you're faced with having to fix the original because it's obsolete and nothing else will fit in its place - the Hechinger round movement for example. It's 48.6mm in diameter and spring-fits into a 51mm hole (often ceramic so not something you can enlarge).Hechinger stopped making them years ago. UTS make something very similar but it's 52.3 mm in diameter so will not fit.
So how to fix? I have one and it's completely dead; not even a slight wobble of the pinion. The battery is good, the battery contacts are good, the sprung terminals at the other end (which press on contacts on the PCB) are good. Mechanically, the plastic wheels and pinion turn freely. And the electromagnetic coil shows an unbroken circuit on a test meter. So that leaves the PCB. There's only one thing mounted on it (apart from the coil) that can be removed and that's the crystal. I don't know how to check it (and I don't have the equipment even if I did know) but I've replaced the existing one with one from a working movement and it made no improvement. Apart from that there's a black "blob" which I presume contains the fifteen flippers to down-size the quartz' 32,768 pulses per second to one per second. There's no way of checking that or even replacing it.
Has anyone on here found a common cause of failure and a solution? Better still, does anyone have any NOS Hechinger round movements or know of any other brand slightly smaller than the UTS?
In the photo, the casing is on the left just to illustrate the type, and the part-stripped movement is on the right - the crystal is normally mounted on the other side but is shown here just to demonstrate.
So how to fix? I have one and it's completely dead; not even a slight wobble of the pinion. The battery is good, the battery contacts are good, the sprung terminals at the other end (which press on contacts on the PCB) are good. Mechanically, the plastic wheels and pinion turn freely. And the electromagnetic coil shows an unbroken circuit on a test meter. So that leaves the PCB. There's only one thing mounted on it (apart from the coil) that can be removed and that's the crystal. I don't know how to check it (and I don't have the equipment even if I did know) but I've replaced the existing one with one from a working movement and it made no improvement. Apart from that there's a black "blob" which I presume contains the fifteen flippers to down-size the quartz' 32,768 pulses per second to one per second. There's no way of checking that or even replacing it.
Has anyone on here found a common cause of failure and a solution? Better still, does anyone have any NOS Hechinger round movements or know of any other brand slightly smaller than the UTS?
In the photo, the casing is on the left just to illustrate the type, and the part-stripped movement is on the right - the crystal is normally mounted on the other side but is shown here just to demonstrate.
