Sligh Grandfather Clock wont chime all the time

The other day we had a call for a Sligh Grandfather clock was chiming erratically. The customer said the chiming would be fine on the quarter hour sometimes then other times it would stop, then start up again and sometime it would be silence  for days.  

We went out to the call and the Sligh Grandfather clock was only about 10 years old, however it had some major surgery performed on it by a competitor of ours out here in the Atlanta Metro area.  The competitor had replace a few bushings in the clock movement. The customer indicated that the strange chiming had started immediately after the other company had repaired the clock.  At first I did not see any problems, so I removed the movement to clean and service it. After all was cleaned and re-oiled, I re-installed the movement and the clocks chiming side was  chiming erratically again. 

After carefully looking at everything, I finally saw the problem.  The clock's movement was on the seat board, however the seat board was backwards and the chiming side cable was rubbing the edge of the seat board, causing friction and stopping the weight from pulling the cable down properly. 

Luckily, it was an easy fix. I simply removed the movement again, turned the seat board around to its correct position and all is working fine.  

I have included some pictures to help you see what I saw. Sometimes, its the simple things that we overlook, that gets us in trouble when troubleshooting a problem with Grandfather clocks. 

Sligh Grandfather Clock Seat board

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In the above picture you can see that the chiming cable is rubbing on the seat board

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In the picture above, you can see the cable now is in the center of the seat boards slot and can clearly pass through and not rub on the side of the seat board.

Again, sometimes its the simple little things we overlook on the troubleshooting of Grandfather clock repairs.  The clock repair service that had replaced the bushings, had re-installed the seat board on backwards and this is where all the customers new problems started.