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 the clock 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:

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