Anyone have experience with the clock ? Should I send it out to fixit pro, or do the quartz myself ? I am not that concerned about originality here, but reliability.

I used the quartz replacement on my 79. It was easy to install and works great.. You will be happy with it..


Roy

Same here. I put the quartz replacment in my '78. Piece of cake to install...works perfectly and you can't tell the difference between it and the original.

Thanks for reply's. Quartz it is. Will dial Willcox.

You can buy a kit for a lot less then the entire clock to convert it yourself, and it will retain all the original parts you can see.

I just fixed mine-it's pretty interesting if you have the patience and curiosty(and in my case, lack of money)
I have a '78 SA pretty much "unhacked" and original, but needing restoration, which I'm slowly doing partly due to bad Massachusetts weather. Once you get the clock out of the cluster, take the nut off the back, bend the tabs and take off the back cover. As you look at it you'll see a tiny set of contacts ,one of which is connected to the pole of a tiny electromagnet(relay coil. When the contacts make they send power to the coil which in turn activates it anpulls the two contacts apart.The movable contact is spring loaded an the pulling of the coil causes kinetic energy to be stored in its tension.(Basically giving a "mini wind-up" to the clock. as this "wind-up" merchanism runs the clock for approx 30-40 seconds,in which time, the tiny set of contacts have come back to making again and the cycle starts all over.
I took a very small contact burnishing tool(available at most electrical hobby stores)and cleaned the contacts(GENTLY!) It doesn't take much- and presto! The clock has worked fine for almost two months,now.
Good Luck!(p.s.-the way I looked at it is,it didn't work when I started,so what did I have to lose?)
Fred Lally
'78 SA in resto process

I just installed the quartz conversion kit in my 75 clock. The second hand moves steady, does not pulse like I thought it would. Only took me about fifteen minutes to complete the conversion once I had the clock out of the cluster, I will give this idea two thumbs up!

Put a quartz conversion in a friend's '66 and it works great. The only way you can tell is that the second hand now moves continuously instead of one second jumps. Good luck.

Marc

Thanks to all for input on quartz clock conversion.