With all the car clocks we've see in this series before today, we've had just two timepieces made by Veglia Borletti: one from a Fiat 124 Sport Spider, the other from a Lancia Scorpion. Today we've got a very unusual Veglia clock, one that I grabbed out of a 1961 Citroën ID19 wagon that I spotted in a San Francisco Bay Area wrecking yard more than a decade ago.
The ID19 was the more affordable version of the majestic DS, which was about the most futuristic production car of the 1950s and 1960s and still rides more comfortably than most 21st-century luxury cars. Not the sort of thing you expect to find at U-Wrench-It, particularly in wagon form.
The Citroën badge from this ID19 still lives on my 1992 Honda Civic, and of course I bought the clock along with the badge. In fact, I bought the entire instrument cluster, because it is such a beautiful piece of hardware.
American car buyers had many good vehicle choices in 1961, but only Citroëns had dashes like this.
To set the time on this clock, you twist a knob that lives at the end of a cable and under the car’s dash. This setup was common on car clocks of the 1940s and 1950s, and continued on Soviet cars until there was no more USSR.
I had to open up this clock’s innards and do some cleaning and oiling to get it to work, but now it keeps good time.
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