This thing actually works -- my 3 year old was fascinated. Yes it's loud, but it's a real, functioning, pendulum clock. You can stop it, like any pendulum clock, by grabbing the pendulum and holding it in the center position and letting go.
There were a few problems. The instructions are quite pretty, but the very first part is almost impossible to see in the photograph. A pointer with the part number would have helped a lot. (More about this part later.) Also, a lot of the parts can be assembled in more than one way. An adult is essential. You need to use logic or just look at things carefully. There are many gears with a shaft, like real clocks have. If you put them upside down it won't work. Some of these are obvious, but some aren't. You just need to think about what you're doing. It's really not that hard. Going through the instructions, with the 3 year old circling each step with a pen (this taught him how to hold a pencil!) and him finding each part and putting all but the hardest in (with my help), we got the thing totally finished and it worked the first time (pendulum moved and escapement worked) except the hands didn't turn. I took the front cover off and reinserted the red spring/gear and seated the center shaft a little better into its hole. Then I paid a little more attention to the friction fasteners that hold the front and rear cover together. But really squeezing everything well, when I reassembled it, all the gears meshed and the hands moved.
The only problem was that very first part, which was so hard to see. It's a part of the chime mechanism. The chime works by a wheel that is turned by the minute hand. It lifts and drops a small metal hammer onto the chime. But that clear part is really totally unnecessary the way it is designed. I found that the curved arm that comes off of it needed to be sharply bent (it's nylon or similar) to let the hammer descend all the way to hit the little chime. The chime is quite soft. The fact that the chime barely works makes me think the instruction writer doesn't even mention it -- nowhere does it say it chimes every 15 minutes. And the geometry of the chime wheel seems to make it impossible for the chime to be on the quarter hour (because the minute hand has a square fitting so is not smoothly adjustable.) If you look at the little nylon piece, it looks like it's meant to be a spring. In other words, I'll bet the original design was that the chime wheel compresses the piece somehow, and when the hammer is released it's supposed to snap down and hit the bell. If anybody can figure this last part out it would mean a little neater toy. But my 3 year old grandson, who is into trains but not really clocks, loved it. It sits on the table an ticks now. He doesn't pay too much attention to it now, but it was really enjoyable to put it together with him.
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Reviews with images
A great toy for kids (and for some adults)
Allows a child to inspect a probable mechanism used for clocks and understand how it works. I used to have such when a was a child, it was manufactured in somewhere like Hungary or Germany. This item has absolutely identical gears but better-looking casing, improved mainspring, and firmer fixing for parts.Sometimes a bit tricky to fix the face cover on the body, it needs to be pushed everywhere around the perimeter, but adults will help their kids in case of problems. Also ensure that the pendulum drive moves smoothly in the housing (without any jamming), in my case I had to cut the plastic casting burr.It can be adjusted to work exactly as a real clock, but to do that you need to make the pendulum heavier. Available pendulum extension is not enough for that, I slowed the pendulum using insulating tape and a coin (increased the mass). Your goal is to make the white gear click 84.2 times per minute (5052.26 per hour) then the clock will be precise.P.S. I am putting assembly instructions since a customer requested it in another comment.
