The design of a cuckoo clock is now conventional. Many are made in the "traditional style", which are made to hang on a wall. The classical or traditional type includes two subgroups the carved ones, whose wooden cases are decorated with leaves, animals, etc., and a second one with cases in the shape of a chalet. They have an automaton of a bird that appears through a small trap door when the clock strikes. ![]() The cuckoo bird is activated by the clock movement as the clock strikes by means of an arm that is triggered on the hour and half hour. There are two kinds of movements: one-day (30-hour) and eight-day clockworks. Some have musical devices, and play a tune on a Swiss music box after striking the hours and half-hours. Usually the melody sounds only at full hours in eight-day clocks and both at full and half hours in the one-day timepieces. Musical cuckoo clocks frequently have other automata which move when the music box plays. Today's cuckoo clocks are almost always weight driven. The weights are made of cast iron usually in a pine cone shape and the "cuckoo" sound is created by two tiny gedackt pipes in the clock, with bellows attached to their tops. The clock's movement activates the bellows to send a puff of air into each pipe alternately when the timekeeper strikes. Since the 1970s, quartz battery-powered cuckoo clocks have become available. As with their mechanical counterparts, the cuckoo bird emerges from its enclosure and moves up and down, but often on the quartz timepieces it also flaps its wings and open its beak while it sings. Just before the call, and in case it has a door, the single or double door opens and the bird emerges as usual, but only on the full hour, and they do not have a gong wire chime. ![]() The movement of the cuckoo in such clocks is regulated by an electromagnet that pulses on and off, attracting a weight, that acts as a fulcrum, connected to the tail of the plastic cuckoo, thus moving the bird up and down in its enclosure. In quartz cuckoos, different systems have been used to produce the bird's call the usual bellows, a digital recording of a real cuckoo in the wild (with a corresponding echo accompanied by the sound of a waterfall and other birds in the background) or a recording of the bird's call only. In musical versions, the hourly chime is followed by the replay of one of twelve popular melodies (one for each hour). ![]() Some musical quartz clocks in the chalet style also reproduce many of the popular automata found on mechanical musical clocks, such as beer drinkers, wood-choppers, and jumping deer.
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