Feeling better. Swapped out the HID ballast on the other headlight of the Porsche. Got sick of waiting on my cousin so I rebuilt the clock.

Li'l secret about clocks? They're all pieces of shit. Their fit and finish is garbage. They're all steel-on-brass with no attempts to limit wear or runout. Pretty much every clock you've ever seen in the US is a Howard Miller, or maybe a Sligh, or maybe a Herschede and it doesn't fucking matter because every single one of them has pretty much the exact same Hermle movements going back to the '60s. Which is whatever because really what determines the time is the length of the pendulum. That's it. Full stop.

What determines how well it tells time? Well there's a bunch of stuff. You can make the pendulum out of Invar, whose coefficient of expansion is technically described as "fuckall." You can add a barometric compensator to minutely adjust the moment of inertia to account for air resistance. You can separate the going from the timing.

But I mean, I'm adjusting the beat error on this thing by tapping at the fork gently with a screwdriver (I got it down to 0.01% and then I turned the chimes on and off again and it went to 0.1%). And I can get the timing from -1s/day to -5s a day just by gently tugging on the pendulum - no adjustments, just seating the damn thing a little more. I'm halfway convinced it crawls back up over time.

Changed out the chimes. Four screws. No longer sounds like a dropped piano. Will not bore you with youtube videos of clock chimes.

More numbers fell off the face of it. Cheap, crappy build. Ten thousand dollar clock and the dial ornamentation is badly-plated nickel alloy.

Closer and closer to doing dumb things.