Measuring the weight required by a cuckoo clock's musical movement
After I clean a musical movement - a cuckoo clock music box - I like to measure how little weight it takes to run the movement.
Before cleaning, this dry and gummed up musical movement required over 400 grams to run - which is way too much.
This video illustrates that after cleaning, oiling, and adjusting the musical movement, 140 grams of BBs barely runs the movement (unevenly), 175 grams performs similarly, 200 grams runs the movement well, and the clock's original 270 gram weight runs the movement very well.
My test weight is a plastic shampoo bottle with the top cut out and a loop of wire passed through the top. I weigh the bottle as I fill it with a certain weight of BBs - ammunition for a BB gun / air rifle - then hook that weight onto the musical movement and see how well the movement runs.
UPDATE October 27, 2019: You likely want more weight than is required to run the clean movement. I found the following in "The Modern Clock" by Ward L. Goodrich, in its chapter on repairing cuckoo clocks: "The use of exposed weights and pendulum necessitates openings in the bottom of the case through which the dust enters freely and this makes necessary... an amount of driving weight in excess of that necessary for protected movements, as there must be enough weight to pull the cuckoo movement through obstructions which would stop the ordinary movement."
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