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Rolling or Wobbling

The path of a pendulum in plan should be a straight line. Any deviation from this will affect the regularity of its timekeeping. A want of squareness in the chops, or a twist in the suspension spring, will often cause rolling or wobbling. Many clockmakers fix the lower end of the spring with but one screw, so that the pendulum may hang plumb without danger of binding. If the pallet staff is not perfectly at right angles to the path of the pendulum, rolling may be caused by the oblique action of the crutch. This shows the necessity of care in adjusting the movement on the seat board in cased clocks, and is an argument in favor of attaching the pendulum of a turret clock to the frame of the movement, instead of to a separate wall bracket.