1970 Panasonic Flip Clock

today I want to do a video on something that has been a quest of mine for about a decade now and that is getting a flip clock before we continue though this video was sponsored by Nord bpn there are some times where you might need to use the internet on a device on an unfamiliar network such as your laptop on Wi-Fi at McDonald's a library or a hotel I personally try to avoid using public Wi-Fi networks over concerns of things like man-in-the-middle attacks with DNS masking but when you use a VPN like Nord VPN it sends all of your web requests to their servers over an encrypted connection that makes that much more difficult they have servers you can connect to in 60 countries around the world and there are no bandwidth or data limits on your connection from my testing though you can expect around 100 megabits depending on the exact servers that you use though my connections overseas were about 50 megabits per second but that's to be expected Nord VPN is available for most major operating systems in the Linux client I've been using is actually very easy to install and use over the command line you can get one month free and 70% off of Nord VPN using the link in my description now let's get back to the clocks now as long as I've had money I've been shopping at thrift stores and I usually shop with family members or other people and have had a long-running joke that I want a Super Nintendo and a flip clock well eventually I found my Super Nintendo and I did not really find my flip clock this is a GE 81 42 4 this is a fairly common clock that you can get without too much difficulty but it isn't a flip clock now I'm certainly not saying that this clock isn't interesting in its own right but if you watch the mechanism at work you will clearly see that it is a rotating clock not a flip clock now the tiles do make a flip as they work their way around the mechanism but it's really not in the same spirit as a traditional flip clock now do not mistake these remarks as criticisms I do enjoy this clock and I knew what I was getting into when I bought it and I use it every day as my clock I can reference while I'm filming I really enjoy the easy legibility of it even though the display to size ratio isn't the best but with the finding of the GE clock it made me realize that I'd spent so long looking for a clock and never found one I really liked that I should just give up and look on eBay and since I would be looking on eBay I decided to look for one that would match a design style that I really enjoyed and recently that has been 70s hi-fi equipment so after doing some research I found out that panasonic made some pretty gorgeous clocks that fit that theme perfectly so I set out to try and find a Kamran so I created an eBay saved search for one and started doing research on it which alerted me to some things and led me to end up buying this non-functional example at least that's how it was described in the listing as I've already shown the flip clock mechanism itself is working just fine though it wasn't without issues and there were some other ones to be tackled now the problem that had this listed as not functional on eBay was the volume knob it was described as dirty and not working that was however easy enough to solve with a little bit of dioxin the tone wheel though still isn't working quite right I could stand to go back and fix that a little more the only other issue that led to me being able to afford this clock because I'm not down for dropping a hundred and fifty dollars on one of these worthy cosmetic issues with it the wood is chipped in a few places and it looks like something was dropped on the top of the plastic that melted it a bit however I felt that the cosmetic defects were minimal at worst and the radio even if I never got it working wasn't enough to scare me off but there were two issues that were undisclosed one of which I'm shocked to have been able to fix and was the reason I was able to do one of my recent videos two of the tiles on the flip clock were broken off and I was not aware of way of replacing or repairing them when I opened the clock and found that I was extremely disappointed this is when by way of a flip clock fans video I found out about the method of repairing things with superglue and baking soda and following their tips on repairing flip clock tiles with this I gave it an attempt and it worked fantastically I was able to get the flip clock tiles working perfectly following their example with the flip tiles repaired there is just one more issue to be resolved with this clock and I will be taking a look at fixing that today however to demonstrate this first let me take another look at the GE flip clock both the Panasonic and the GE clock keep time by constantly running a motor and both of them let you see the motor movement up front on the GE clock the motor movement is actually pretty slow here this is likely after gear reduction I didn't pay attention to the mechanism inside but on the Panasonic clock the indicator is directly on the motor itself and with that indicator we can see that it's not quite working right the indicator spins much faster once it finally gets going on the Panasonic but it's very inconsistent it doesn't always start up when I plug the clock in and I've had it cease when running the clock as well after a bit more research I've learned that motors like this can become clogged with dust dirt and other debris so it would make a lot of sense for that to have happened after all the exterior of this example is incredibly dirty and really needs to be soaked and then scrubbed I went over this and spent a fair bit of time cleaning it this is clean compared to how I got it so let's finally begin today's repair by opening this up and taking a look at the motor you only need to remove these two screws to get into the clock on mine the screw pole for this one is completely stripped so it's a little weird to get out and honestly not that great but that is it once you've done that you can open it up now there is a small amount of advice I want to give anyone who considers purchasing one of these on top of the fact that you have to remove these knobs this is attached to the clock mechanism directly because it controls the sleep delay if you turn this you'll hear it wind mechanism inside it's yeah there's that so this has to be pulled off which is concerning sounding but that's fine these knobs come off fairly easily but this top piece alright it's possible to tell if one of these has been opened online usually because people who open this up get this far go oh and then put it back together don't usually snap the front down and it gets left like this you feel like it takes too much pressure to put it back down and you end up with the plastic leaning back like this this should be flat on top if you are trying if you're looking at one of these and it's not flat on top and you have a lip along the front here then you know it has been opened and not closed correctly so that's something you might want to be aware of but now we're inside and we can take a look at it I probably want to the arcs of that tone knob while I'm in here as well let's there are actually a few things so take a look at while we're in here so let's get looking at those now that we're inside we can get a good look at the clock mechanism and something I would like to note is a rather curious choice by Panasonic so here we have an incandescent bulb to light the display that makes sense but it's right above this metal bar well okay the thing is incandescent bulbs generate quite a lot of heat it heats up this metal bar and then these metal tabs down here that hold the tiles up touch the tiles and melt the tops of them so the more use your clock has had the more this line of the at the top of the tiles will become prom and here we can also better see the motor down in there and that's what we really want to get to so I'm going to have to undo that one screw so I can remove this entire thing this doesn't come out very easily there are no connectors anywhere everything is soldered directly in so I'll just kind of have to keep it all nearby actually the motor feels pretty free here which is somewhat concerning I'm gonna try plugging it in and see what happens so it's spun up with no issues at all the whole mechanism moves so slow it's hard to see anything going on while we're here though you can't see one interesting part about how flip clocks work so the tiles have these hooks that hang off the side these push on this metal bar here that holds up the next hour so we can see you are on 59 here and the tab up above has released this digit already it's only being held in place by this metal tab so once the top of 59 flips down the five will flip down as well pretty clever design and now we can see that this metal tab has moved back over it's about five times now in a row I've actually started and stopped the motor and it seems to be working just fine so I'm wondering if maybe the motor itself is not dirty it might be something else in the case this piece of felt is part of what holds the display mechanism in place but it's not on there tremendously well it's possible it could be falling down and rubbing on the motor preventing it from starting up fully it really takes no pressure at all to get the motor to stop spinning so the piece of felt draping down on it could very easily do that I went ahead and deoxidize knobs and tone was still very inconsistent I think that the pot might actually be kind of burn out a little bit because I can't get it to work and there's a very unpleasant area in it okay with a light at the right angle we can see the motor is spinning down in there but I just caught it seizing so it's not fully functional now if I try and stop it here it comes back without any issue right now but I really don't understand what is and isn't making it working he's wondering maybe is power draw from the radio could be a snob somehow this is a frustrating problem to solve it's not the felt the felt doesn't go past that metal shield that you can actually see down there so yeah it's not that because it can't reach no there we go just the gentle poke and it stops hmm very strange well okay it's being confusing on how it is failing right now so I want to give it some time plugged in to seize and be able to feel the resistance to see if it is catching somehow but while I'm doing that I want to make the most of the time and I want to get he's clean so it's absolutely filthy I want to remove the speaker here and the headphone jack that's right my clock from the 70s has a headphone port and your new phone likely doesn't so I can soak this in a little bit of water and scrub it I do think a toothbrush is going to be the best option here because there's so much fine detail in this so yeah let me go ahead and do that all right I'm pretty happy with how this looks I think I'm gonna go rinse it off and let it dry for a bit well I have some hot soapy water here though I would really like to try cleaning these knobs so don't know how easily I can get them to remove but if I can really really like - sweet yeah it's gross motor still hasn't seized on the clock this one on the left is the one I just cleaned and this is the unclean knob and you can just see how much dirt and crud there is down in those little crevices so yeah cleaning these very much worthwhile and I might as well get the brush a little dampen go over the clock face itself as well ah you can see here this part is painted black and the black paint is flaking up right there so that's something I want to be careful about I shouldn't clean this too much or I could aggravate that more oh yeah that's definitely looking a lot better I really enjoy this thing the flip clock has yet to fail though so I'm wondering if I'm going to get it to do that at all the only thing more annoying than a problem is an intermittent problem okay I can't really get the clock to fail um I don't know what the problem is so I putting it mostly back together and I'm just gonna button it up and call it done for now maybe I can watch it a little bit and start to get a better idea of how its failing but at this point I want to show you how to properly close this so you can see if you put the top on it stops here and this goes back to that point where as telling you how to properly identify if these have been worked on and if you press down on it you hear that really loud unsettling lock go into place and need to do that on both sides it is it takes a very terrifying amount of force oh yeah that feels so wrong but that's how you get it back together there are latches there you know what I need to go ahead and clean these dials still because these are gross as well this whole thing was covered in some awful grease or something I don't know what it was but it's nasty I should do these all right now that they're all clean I can go ahead and get them put back on turn the knobs to a known position and I can get these back in place just a little side note here this spindle or post stem that's it was compressed inwards so this part was sliding off in order to fix that I just took a flathead screwdriver and just jammed it in there that will widen that back out and make this fit properly again so there's that it could stand to be a little bit tighter still but it's it's plenty fine for the sleep timer knob there's actually a metal clip going around the plastic base so it's really hard to force it on you have to get that metal clip around the post and then it will slide on but after that it's fine and do keep in mind that if you have it plugged in if this is turned at all then the radio will be on you need to have this turn all the way off and you'll feel it click when it hits zero before it will actually turn off the radio when you have it set to the off position all right now that it is all cleaned up and put back together let's take a look at what's controls on this are so the radio is turned on up here we have the indicator for FM and if we turn this over to a.m. it switches to the AM indicator now we have the tuning dial right here and I just absolutely love how this indicates which station you're on the small dial in the middle all that rocks now one thing though is that it Tunes both AM and FM from the same dial so it's difficult if you want to just have one AM station tuned in and one FM station tuned in you can't you got to keep moving back and forth to the ones that you want obviously we have volume and then we have tone it still doesn't want to work for me I think that pots just gone now we have two other positions for the dial up here one for auto and one for alarm if we let the alarm run to the time that it currently is that is what the alarm sounds like on this and auto would start playing the radio instead of the alarm if we go past the alarm time the radio turns off now do note there what it actually did it fades out this isn't a tube radio but it is very very analog inside the final control we have is over here and this is the timer so if I want to listen to music for 30 minutes I would turn this to 30 and then it would play for 30 minutes until this timer ran out and then it would shut off we can easily set the time here although hopefully you don't have to set the time that frequently but if the motor is jamming then you likely will hopefully that problem is somewhat unique to mine though now on the back we have an earphone connector now I need to keep in mind that headphones in this time period typically had a quarter inch Jack this isn't really what this was meant for the earphone connector was actually meant for a single earphone we'll just pretend that these are them and when you plug it in it mutes the internal speaker and the earphone that you connect is meant to go under your pillow so that you can listen to the radio while your partner sleeps here's one final interesting thing about the radio we have FM and we have FM AC now if we tune to just FM and turn on the radio we don't have a very strong signal we can manually tune it in and try and get it a little closer but it can be difficult so here we are it's pretty weak I'll send it to FM AC and it locks right in this is an automatic frequency control circuit that will tune the radio for you only on FM though on AM year pretty much on your own I guess I got one more fact about the radio yet still I've been running this on a kilowatt and as it sits here without the radio on it is currently drawing 3.3 watts if I turn the radio on and leave it muted it jumps up to five watts if I really cranked the radio it goes up by about half a watt so it can pump out some power but it's nowhere near like a full stereo system that was uncomfortably loud for me at half a watt so yeah that's only two out of ten oh man this thing could just roast it speaker I guarantee that but that's not something I'm ever really going to have to worry about because my intended use case for this is to sit right on top of my Pioneer SX 780 and look gorgeous so the radio isn't all that useful and that pretty much sums up everything I have to say about this clock it is just so pretty I really like all of its little features it's just it's perfect it's exactly what I wanted I love that it has wood sides it has a stainless steel front it blends in perfectly with the look that I want here I hope you guys have enjoyed looking at this clock as much as I do if you want to support the channel I am on patreon but for now that's it I'll see you next time

Channel: Tech Tangents

Views: 32,254

Rating: 4.9497209 out of 5

Keywords: AkBKukU, main, 1970s, Panasonic, Cameron, RC-7469, Flip Clock, Radio, Wood

Id: tr5Qc8Zv6pU

Length: 22min 47sec (1367 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 14 2019