Laurie Penman has written an indispensable guide for both the absolute beginner and the experienced clock enthusiast. "The Clock Repairer's Handbook" provides information on how to repair and maintain a clock's delicate mechanics and teaches the basics of clock repairing through detailed, easy-to-follow instructions and more than three hundred instructive diagrams and illustrations. Advice and directions for cleaning clock movements, pivoting and mounting, fixing train faults and gears, the importance of lubrication and friction, and how to make sure the strike and chimes work on the hour, every hour. "The Clock Repairer's Handbook" provides all the necessary information to troubleshoot any clock's problems and to make sure your clock continues to run in perfect order for generations to come.

This book is a practical guide to selecting, setting up and using an engineer's lathe to create parts specifically for clockmaking or clock repairs. It begins as an instructional manual and consequently the first chapter assumes that the reader does not yet have a lathe and needs advice on choosing one. With over 160 diagrams and photographs, topics include: choosing and setting up the lathe; turning - materials and facing; boring and milling techniques; chucks, collets and face-plates; creating a height-centring gauge; pivots, wheels and pinions; removing and mounting gear wheels; fly cutters; making a flat depthing tool and, finally, creating centre marking tools. The intent is to provide a gentle learning curve for the practical use of the lathe.

The "common escapements" are those that are found in the domestic clocks that are most frequently found in a clock repairer's workshop. The average clock repairer is very rarely called upon to attend to a three legged gravity escapement or a "Graham grasshopper" (my earlier book "Practical clock escapements" deals with those). A book that deals with the design of the escapement only is very useful, but what a repairer really wants is a quiet word with the person who mauled the clock last and some useful information about what to do to repair or replace the sad result. This book describes what the escapement should look like, how it should operate and practical measures to achieve those aims. It also explains the effects that different proportions of the movement have on the design of the escapement and points out the errors that arise as a result of assuming that all escapements are "square," ie. linking the pallet arbor centre to the tip of the tooth that is about to be touched by the pallet, from there to the wheel centre and from there to the tooth that has just been released, and back to the arbor centre again - will trace out an approximate square. Most British authors appear to make this assumption, because long case and bracket clocks typically have square escapements, yet American and Continental clocks very frequently are anything but square. As a result repairers find themselves in difficulty when dealing with escapements that do not conform to the British pattern. My hope (and expectation) is that this book will make the life of the average repairer a little easier.