I saw Harrison's clocks years ago during a visit to Greenwich but there was no way I could have fathomed out how they worked from such a short visit (even if I

I saw Harrison's clocks years ago during a visit to Greenwich but there was no way I could have fathomed out how they worked from such a short visit (even if I were able). This story surprised me because I'd have thought by now that Harrison's clocks would have been analyzed to the nth degree and copies of them made given their historical significance. In recent years we've seen considerable efforts made in trying to reverse engineer the Antikythera mechanism so it's surprising a similar effort hasn't gone into a full understanding of these wonderful clocks, especially given that we have them both intact and in good combination. It seems to me we should not only have a full mechanical understanding of these clocks together with a good rationale for why Harrison tackled the problem as he did but also that an x-ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis should be done on the metals used in their construction. Assuming Harrison used the best materials available in the Eighteenth Century then an XRF analysis would give us a better understanding of the composition of those materials and of their production but also of the metrology methods in use in Harrison's time.