Common clock escapements: A description of common escapements and practical workshop methods for mechanical clocks ancient and modern

Penman has written books and articles on clocks and machines for a long time. He writes well, has good theoretical knowledge and above all great practical experience. This book is a follow on to a prior book on escapements and adds some tips, nuances and advice relating to a very narrow subject, except maybe to clockmakers and repairers.

Hi,Laurie Penman has turned his engineering skills into a theoretical approach to clock making and repair - He always comes up with factual engineering approach to the problems in clock repair and clock making - all his books are worth collecting if you are interested in this artBrian Australia

I was horribly disappointed with this book. The printer made some dreadful mistakes when taking Laurie Penman's original graphics (which I know were absolutely wonderful and clear) and enlarging them for the book pages, the granularity was lost, they look very weak and for me its hard to reconcile Penman's expert writings with such poorly printed graphics.

I have to agree with the other reviewers, the poor quality of the illustrations in this book seriously subtract from its overall usefulness. The written information is actually quite good, but because the line drawings are low resolution, someone not already familiar with the subject matter will have a difficult time understanding it. The drawings look like they were done on a dot-matrix printer and are pretty inadequate for some of the more intricate subjects. I gave the book 3 stars mainly for the text, which has a lot of good information, but I would not recommend this for a beginner. If you are a novice looking for escapement knowledge, I would suggest Laurie Penman's other book on Amazon, "Practical Clock Escapements" (ISBN 0-9523270-4-X), the production values are much higher and the information is just as good, with many valuable (and much clearer!) illustrations.

Laurie Penman is a master of clock escapements. This book is well written,very informative, and will be very useful for anyoneinterested in clock movements. I also recommend his earlier book, "Practical Clock Escapements", as a companion book. Laurie has several clock repair books published all of which are very excellent.

Great book here.....Got just what I was looking forThanks

The text may be excellent, as others have said, but the graphics are miserable. Listening to an explanation of the precise workings of a tick-tock clock with one's eyes closed would make no sense, but a good picture of the mechanism can convey the critical information. These badly presented diagrams do not convey anything except a kind of lazy contempt for the reader. It is a shame and an insult - this cutting corners - to the point where I consider the book absolutely worthless unless you are already an expert in the field. And, the thing of it is, the author has the drawings and diagrams now, and had them then when the book was printed. Did the publisher's bean counters put a stop to doing the right thing? Who knows. Whatever, were Common Clock Escapements to be reprinted with decent drawings - no, not good enough - with outstanding drawings and diagrams I would be happy to be first in line to buy a revised edition.

This looks like a self-published book, with pretty poor "production values", IMHOThe graphics are pretty low quality, and there is no attempt made to explain the sometimes pretty arcane vocabulary with well-labelled figures in an introductory chapter. May be a useful reference work for somebody that already knows their stuff, but not a good jumping-off point if you are just wanting to get started in horology.

useful information

The book helps clear up the mystery about escapements. Well worth the money. The next step is to jump in there and have a go at replacing some verges.

Altough the writer is quite notable as far as technique's going, his grafics are treadfully low on pics. Even the slightest angle on a strait line is showed as pixelled. Makes not only the book itself look cheaply but in many cases made it difficult to read into the drawings to understand the accompagned text.

Excellent book.

I have a copy of Laurie's previous work, on escapements, which is far more theoretical.I liked it a lot but was seized with an uncontrollable desire to wield a red pencil as an editor.In particular, the computer generated 'walk through' of the escapement working suffered from pixilation.That this is unnecessary is demonstrated by his use of very finely presented line diagrams, on the next page.The section on American escapements is particularly well covered. It is worth buying just for that.