Cleaning My Old Clocky

I've owned a clocky alarm clock since 2009. It's my favourite alarm clock, not because it can run about when triggered, but because it has a nice, loud, pseudo-random alarm, and uses 24-hour time for both display and setting of the alarm, without any other cluttering display elements. Each function also has its own dedicated button (alarm on/off, ``roll off'' on/off, snooze, hour advance, minute advance, alarm set, time set) without any silly touch screen mechanics. It's all digital, which makes setting things precisely that much easier as well.

It does run on 4× AAA batteries, but that's not really a problem. Each set of batteries last about a year or so---I didn't keep track of it because it is that infrequent that I need to change the batteries. There is a ``low-battery'' indicator that will inform me when it is about time to change the batteries, so it really isn't an issue.

I recently took apart my clocky alarm clock to clean it up. I've not cleaned the poor bugger for more than a decade, and the amount of dust and dirt built up is just... horrible. I did try to clean it every now and then when I was way put off, but without taking things apart, there were just too many strange places of dust gathering that could not be cleaned. I also screwed up one of the more recent cleaning steps by using 70% isopropyl alcohol to clean the window, and somehow it leaked through the adhesive and caused the interior to fog up, making it impossible to read the display without triggering the lighting mechanism via the snooze button. That was not ideal, and so I had to take it apart to remove that plastic window so that I can see the display again.

The first obstruction to taking it apart was that the four cross-head screws were covered up by a plastic screw cover that, over the years, had been shoved in deep. There was no way to non-destructively remove them, and so, they were destructively removed via drilling. For more details on the guts, consider checking out this page from Instructables.com.

Once that was done, everything else was much more straightforward to handle. I don't have any ``before'' pictures (those are too horrific to share), but here is a fully-assembled ``after'' picture.

Yes, the wheels are no longer pristine white, as is all the other plastic parts, but what can I say about a device that literally travelled with me throughout the world over the past 12 years?

Discolouration issues aside, the only other complaint I have after such a long operation time is that it has started to gain time at the rate of about 1 minute every couple of months or so. It's not that big a deal (I set my alarm clock to run 15 minutes ahead of local time anyway), but it is something that I need to remember to check on every now and then. That is just a good habit anyway for any time-keeping device that doesn't synchronise itself against the GPS constellation or the Network Time Protocol (NTP).

There aren't many electronics that last as long and remain as useful as my beloved alarm clock. Here's to another decade of wonderful operation.

Till the next update.