A. E. Wiggins Hipp Clock

By Richard Watkins

2025, 31 pages, ill

• A. E. Wiggins Hipp Clock; the battery is in the plastic box and it is running so the pendulum is swinging to the right.

The Hipp system is extremely simple with only a pendulum, motion works driving the hands and a "toggle".

I got A. E. Wiggins Hipp clock at auction. I thought that it is interesting enough to write an article on it.

This article is provided as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file of about 3 MB:

Three remarks:

First, the battery I swapped for a fully charged battery after 1 month; the battery size is in Figure 4-5 of the article.

Second, it should be fast in Winter (+seconds), when the temperature is lower and the pendulum rod is shorter. It declines in Summer (-seconds) when the temperature is higher and the pendulum rod is longer. Don't forget that I am in the Southern hemisphere where Summer is from the beginning of December until the end of February.

Here is a running table of dates and performance.
The second entry is the clock time, fast or slow.
The third entry is average per month seconds = (clock seconds)/(days in the month)
The fourth entry is monthly seconds = (clock secs current month) - (clock secs previous month).
The fifth entry is average per day= (seconds per month)/(days per month):

Third, the hands are made of brass with a brass dial. Most dials are white with black hands so the time is easy to read. I couldn't make the dial white, let alone change it, so I whitened the hands with nail polish; see the photo below. I chose nail polish because it is easy to remove if I or someone wanted to restore the hands to their original brass.

This article is provided as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file of about 3 MB:

Download

• Hands made white. It is running so the pendulum is to the left.

Illustrations: A. E. Wiggins Hip Clock (the battery is in the plastic box); and the hands made white. It is running so the pendulum is to the left.