Readjusting watch hands on UTS DCF clockworks
08 Jun 2023
UTS DCF is a high-quality automatic clockwork based on the German DCF77 standard. I have a clock using one of these I like very much, but due to unfortunate circumstances, the watch hands got into the wrong alignment1. So I very much wanted to fix this. This is what I did follow my instruction at your own risk.
At first, you need to get the clockwork into the 0:00:00 position. To do this ensure that the clock has a battery and short the reset pins. I used a small slow screwdriver. The clockwork will now go into the position where all hands are supposed to point directly up2. Then the clockwork stops and will do nothing.
The next step is to pull out the battery and put a pin into the pinhole to lock the mechanism. New clockworks tend to come with a nice pin that fits perfectly for this, but you can use any small enough pin.
Now you can adjust the hands with careful rotation or just pull them out and put them in anew. Adjust them that all of them point directly up.
Now plug out the pin and insert the battery. Don’t do this the other way around. Now the clock should start to move to 4:00:00.
Mine did not. So now comes a strange part that scares me, but worked perfectly for two of these clockworks. Put the battery in the wrong way wait a few seconds and put it in normally.
After this, my clock did a full rotation of the second hand and then moved to 4:00:00. This is a little strange and most clockworks are supposed to go a full round to 0:00:00, but this one goes to the next interval round 4 hours. So if you plug out the battery again and reinsert it, it will go to 8:00:00 and on the next try to 0:00:00.
Now you should wait a few minutes and the clock will show the correct time when it gets a signal. It will usually go faster if you put the clock next to a window.
I hope this will help you to make your clock work correctly in less than the two hours I needed.