Making a clock spin faster
I made a video that answers exactly this question called: How fast can a Quartz Clock spin?

What is in the video?

In the video I show:


How to deconstruct the clock.
What circuitry you can potentially use to make the clock spin faster.
What is the maximum speedup you can (roughly) obtain on a regular Quartz wall clock.


Specifically the video first breaks apart a Quartz Clock mechanism, hooks up the solenoid that powers the clock to a H-Bridge driver and then hooks up the H-Bridge driver to an Arduino. Then we proceed to program the Arduino so that the clock spins faster and faster until it can spin no faster without experiencing errors. This is how I worked out how fast a Quartz Clock mechanism can spin and what I recommend you do too. See the video for more details and get a gist for how you might do it yourself.

What were the final results?



The fastest time I managed to get the clock mechanism to spin without errors (slipping or direction reverse) was 156ms per second tick. This means that we can get (1000 / 156) = 6.41 (2dp) ticks per second. If you could get 156ms down to 142ms then you could get in around seven ticks per second but I don't think that you are going to do much better than that on a common quartz clock mechanism.

So the answer to the question "how fast can I make a quartz clock spin?" is:


  6 ticks per second on average, 7 ticks per second maximum without changing the mechanics of the internal mechanism. Faster speeds can probably be accomplished with a custom motor / mechanics.


So, finally, we can now ask the question, "what is the minimum time that we can get the hour hand to spin around the clock without rotating the tuning gear?" the answer for me is:


  (156 * 60 * 60 * 12 / 1000) = 6739.2 seconds = 112.2 minutes = 1 hour 52 minutes 19 seconds


Which was a pretty interesting result to me; I hope that you think so too.

Hope this helps; good luck!

I think that this really does answer your question perfectly. I hope you enjoy the video. It took me a bit to make. Let me know what you think!

P.S. I made the video first and then saw this question. So this is a fortunate coincidence.