[Mike Phelan]

Our 1950 D25 Teasmade clock stopped at 8:05 Sunday night -so we had to get out of bed to make coffee Monday morning. The shame of it!

Clearly, this could not possibly go on, so I spent a day sorting it out.
A few years ago, I found that the clock motor was becoming noisy - a whirring sound, caused by the Tufnol rotor bearings being worn and attempting to vibrate at mains frequency.

Thick oil made a temporary cure, but my better half could not sleep with this, so a quick solution (bodge) was called for, that being two 4K7 resistors in series with the stator coil that gave a weaker field and less 50Hz oomph.

Now, the fault was that the resistors had gone slightly high, and the clock would not run unless the rotor was given a spin.

So, until I do the job properly and make new bearings, I had a couple of later Teasmades that I was going to make into one; one was an 855 with a missing motor, the other the smaller 854 that used the same motor, but the stator coil was OC. A while ago Mike Barker made a new coil for this one, so the way forward was to make one good Teasmade from two. I stripped and completely cleaned all the parts so the 855 now looks like new and woke us up with a coffee this morning.

I’ll post something about the D25 bearing repair when I get time to do it.