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Time spent at the watch bench

Watch repair is different than time spent at the jeweler bench. Both are nice, but usually I’m in the mood for one or the other and last night I was in watch mode. Currently I have two watches and a clock in the works, one is a Rolex in for a cleaning for a friend but I didn’t want to deal with the stress of expensive stuff, so I grabbed the other watch which is a Lord Elgin I bought off ebay. Overall, it’s a nice mens watch with good lines on the case but I don’t like the Speidel band and the face is a little worn. So, off the shelf and onto the bench. A few minutes later and I have it broke down to start the cleaning and repair work.

You can see the typical lines of a 1940-50’s watch, streamline with a certain understated elegance. I still don’t like the band though, I’m thinking a nice leather on would be better. The face looks ok in that pic, it’s not till you get up close that you start to see the effects that time and carelessness have had on it. Take a look at this closer pic.

Now you can see around the edges of the face where the finish is blistered and missing from wear against the case and lack of cleaning. I have a feeling that some of it is caused by body oil/sweat getting into the case and finding its way onto the dial. Either way, something will have to be done with it. The case itself is in good shape and should clean up nicely with a light polishing and buff.

Enough with the cosmetics, time to get to the cleaning. Someone sold the watch on ebay because it would not run. It was wound tight, you couldn’t wind it more, but you could still set the time by pulling out the stem. When I received the watch I popped open the back and could see that the balance swung freely, and it wasn’t loose, but it would only swing about 7 times and slowly come to a stop. The balance is what causes the ‘tick tick tick’ noise in a watch by swinging back and forth and tripping the escape. Hmmm, might be nothing more than a worn out mainspring not having much ‘spring’ left to it. So, lets take a look at it.

The spring is out, and it looks like maybe someone has put a spring in it before. That spring isn’t a DuraPower spring that was used at the factory, wrong color and it has the wrong curve. Seeing the spring out does confirm one of my suspicions though, this spring appears to have taken a ‘set’, it no longer has much strength due to the fact that it wants to stay coiled up on itself. The package next to the spring is a factory replacement spring, new-old-stock, from my collection of parts. Heres what a factory DuraPower spring looks like next to the old one I removed.

Quite a difference, eh? Normally I wouldn’t unwind a spring from a package like this, but it helps you to see what a new spring looks like and how much more open the coils are. The other pieces in that picture are the spring barrel (brass, top middle) that the spring is wound into, the barrel arbor (steel, top middle) which transfers the spring’s power to the watch, and the barrel cover (brass, middle right) which caps the spring in the barrel and keeps the arbor centered.

So how do I get that long spring wound into the barrel without bending it, going insane, and raving like a lunatic? I use a spring winder. I found an old set after trying to install springs by hand, which is about as easy as wrangling two wet and angry cats into a small burlap sack. (I should have taken pictures of my hands after trying to install springs without a winder, you would have thought I had actually tried the cat thing). I’ll show you the spring winder using the old spring…

After you determine which way the spring needs to be would for the watch you are working on, you put the inner eye of the spring on one of the winding mandrels. This locks the inner coil of the spring to the winder mandrel just like on the watch barrel arbor.

Still holding the mandrel with the spring on it, we take the other half of the winder and place it’s four ‘fingers” over the spring and allow the excess spring to hang out of the winder between any two ‘fingers’. Enlarge the pic above to see the details.

Then you turn the mandrel or the other half of the tool to wind the spring inside the four fingers of the tool. If you do it right then it looks like the pic above with the spring all coiled up and ready to install. The fingers are adjusted before you wind the spring to just fit inside the spring barrel so that the tools with a wound spring can be inserted into the barrel. A button on the back of the tool allows you to slowly press the spring out of the tool and into the spring barrel just as nice as can be.

And there is the spring nicely installed into the spring barrel with the barrel arbor installed into the eye of the spring. All that is left is to put the barrel arbor cap on top and move on to the next item on our cleaning/repair. For those that repair watches, I used Novastar winding grease on the mainspring before installing, I haven’t found any definitive proof on using grease with DuraPower springs but I also haven’t seen an Elgin document that says not to.

Next comes the gear train that takes the power from the spring and makes it a time keeping device. the gears went in to the ultrasonic cleaner three times (cleaner, pre-rinse, rinse) and came out looking really nice. All the old oils and dirt are cleaned off so we won’t have any gummy residue from previous servicing, and no dust to combine with new oils and make abrasive paste. Here is a picture to show you the size of the gears in this watch.

That was the extent of the work last evening, since I had a few other things I wanted to do like look at the 400 ft of different colored pyro fuse USPS dropped off earlier, and clean some ammo casings since I had the ultrasonic cleaner out……

Airplane Porn.. P-51 Style

Today has been a Monday, but this made it a lot better for a few minutes.

Continuing work….

Last night before I fell asleep the thought crossed my mind to bring the materials and tools for a valve guide I need to make to work with me. This morning I miraculously remembered to bring the tools and materials, and today at lunch I began the construction of the second valve guide for my dad’s Fairbanks-Morse hit and miss engine. I had already made a set of guides from cast iron to go in the cast iron head. Those guides didn’t work out, so I decided to try bronze this time since I have successfully used bronze guides in cast iron Harley heads when I worked for a dealership. And since I need stuff to blog about, you can suffer through it with me….. lol.

That’s a 1″ diameter chunk of solid bronze rod all ready for me to abuse it and coerce it into some kind of usable object. to begin i need to put it in the lathe and turn one of the ends flat. The process of turning on of the ends flat is called ‘facing’, probably because we are dressing up the ‘face’ of the material. When done it looks like this

The next thing to do is to make a dimple in the exact center of the area I cleaned up so that when I go to drill through the material the drill bit stays centered. It may seem weird to think that a drill bit almost 1/2″ in diameter would flex and drill off center, but they do. It’s a strange thing to see in person, but I have and it will mess up whatever you are working on really quick. So, out comes the center drill (funny they would name the tool that) and I get it set in the tailstock chuck. Center drills look a little odd, not like a regular drill bit.

The shape gives the tool extra strength so it won’t flex or move, perfect for doing it’s intended job.

Now I can run a drill down the center of the bronze and get the bore for my valve opened up. Pop the center drill out of the tailstock chuck, get a 27/64″ drill bit in there instead and start drilling!

Wait….. WTF?!?! Really? Dammit! Remember what I said about drills wandering earlier? That is just what happened. The drill bit is a little bent, not enough you can see it but enough that it is cutting off center and leaving a little cone of material right in the middle where there should be a hole. Now I have to center drill the mistake out and try with another 27/64″ drill bit.

The ‘cone’ in the middle is removed, borrowed a bit from one of my co-workers, let’s try drilling that bore again.

Oh yeah, now we are getting somewhere. It took another 15 minutes to get this hole all the way through the rod. You can’t rush this kinda thing or you break tools, machinery, and parts in a very impressive way. Usually the results of carelessness or ignorance is a shower of drill bit shrapnel, broken or badly damaged drill chuck, and a mangled part with some of the drill bit still stuck in it. All that accompanied by a sound like a large firecracker going off. Overall, not a pleasant experience and I’ve had my share.

The hole is rough, and it’s still slightly undersized by design. The next step it to use a reamer to make the hole a precise size and make it smooth through the entire bore. I have a chucking reamer for this purpose and it goes in the tailstock chuck where the drill bit was. By doing all of these steps without taking the material out of the machine I have the best chance of keeping all the separate tools traveling down the same path to make the hole, and keeping the hole kinda precise.

Dang, lunch break is over. This will have to be continued in another post…..

Happy Thursday!

A nice old watch

I seem to have a serious lack of self control when it comes to old watches….. and cookies,….. but who doesn’t like good cookies? So, when I saw this little pocket watch pop up on ebay it caught my eye.

It has a chunk of the original porcelain face missing, and some cracks. The crystal is yellowed slightly so it probably has a plastic replacement that has been in it for a while…

But, a few interesting things stood out to me right away: the pierced metal cover over the balance, the advance/retard plate, the layout of the engraved name, it is key set / key wound, and that the plates use tapered pins instead of screws. All of these things tend to point to a very old watch of say… 1780 to 1850’s origin. The real tell would be if it is a fusee watch and what type of escape mechanism it has, so I bought it, lol.

Thats the best pic I could get of the upper balance plate and all it’s fine detail. These pieces weren’t mass produced, each was made for the individual watch by the watchmaker. Imagine the time it took to cut, drill, file, and embellish that one piece without the use of modern power tools. Just for info sake, the upper balance plate on this watch would technically not be considered a ‘balance cock’ because a typical ‘cock’ is only supported on one end. This plate has multiple supports. If you want to see a typical cock and it’s definition visit this page.

And now some of my readers are giggling and others are disappointed at the pictures on the page referenced…. *sigh*

And now most of you are wondering what the hell I’m talking about…. fusee….escape mechanism…. balance. What are these things you speak of? A fusee is a cone shaped pulley with a spiral groove around it. It is usually attached to a spring by a small chain and is used to regulate the pull of the spring as the spring unwinds. A fusee, chain, and spring look like this..

More info on fusee’s can be found at this page. This watch happens to be a fusee (only known once I received it and looked) and I tried to get some decent pics of what the fusee in this watch looks like. Here are the results.

If you look closely in the center of the picture you will see the chain in the dark area. To the upper right is the fusee itself and on the lower left you can see the chain wrapped around the spring barrel with the mainspring inside. Overall, it’s just like the diagram above, but with bad lighting and amateur photography.

That is honestly the best pic I could get of the fusee. Click on the pic and see the larger version, it’s actually quite fascinating. You can see the spiral groove cut into it, the taper of the cone, and the chain in the lowest groove of the fusee. Even with modern equipment I would not want to cut that spiral groove in the fusee, it would be quite a task and I doubt it would end up as precise and clean as this one is.

Here is a pic of the chain wrapped around the mainspring barrel. It’s hard for me to describe just how small that chain is. The whole watch is only about 2 inches in diameter and the barrel the chain is resting on is maybe 3/4 of an inch in diameter and 1/4 inch thick. I am really surprised the chain is even intact, I need to do some digging to see if it is a newer (early 1900’s) replacement and not the original.

See, it really is a small watch.

The engravings read ‘C. Fraumont’ and ‘A Paris No. 447’. So far I haven’t been able to turn up anything on the name or the address. I did a quick search for both including the terms ‘horologie’, ‘horologist’, ‘horologer’, and ‘bijouterie’. I was hoping to find a listing somewhere for ‘C. Fraumont’ in Paris as a watchmaker to narrow down a time frame it was made in. No such luck yet.

One last pic. This is part of the ‘train’ of gears that make the watch function. I haven’t seen this configuration in my limited experience with watches before. Granted, the oldest watch I’ve worked on was made in 1868 and was already a movement that was an industry standard until they quit making mechanical pocket watches. It’s different enough that I won’t be taking this one apart and cleaning it until I have talked to a couple more knowledgeable people about it. The last thing I want to do is damage the watch through ignorance. Heres the pic…

Looking in past the crown gear (right in the middle of the pic, looks like a king’s crown hence the name) there is a horizontal pinion gear on a long arbor, and for the life of me I have no clue what it’s doing. If I find out, it will be in another post with a description of balances and maybe even escape mechanisms.

Collecting seeds for next year

Even though its still in the upper 90 degree range here in the valley, it’s still Fall and things have run their course. All the water and sunlight won’t make some things live any longer than they were meant, and the time to collect seed has begun. I had already started drying the last seed heads for the carrots about a month ago and have been waiting to collect them until I have other seeds to pull and the sunflowers are ready. I only grew 4 sunflowers this year since I wanted to give more space to the other things in my planting boxes. One of the sunflowers was planted in square container pot and actually did the best, growing to about twice the size of the ones in the planting bed. I think next year all the sunflowers will be in containers. The largest one was actually good sized for a ‘dwarf’ Sunny variety.

Once I cleaned the dried flower parts off of the seeds I could see that there was a fair amount of good sized hulls, this year might be a good harvest!

It takes a few minutes to get all of the seeds out of the flower, but it was a Saturday afternoon and I didn’t have anything else too pressing to do. I got this one cleaned out, and the other three smaller ones which were this size…

And I ended up with a enough to fill the bottom of one of my water buckets like this….

Not a bad haul for 4 little flowers. I went and got my paper envelopes to put the seed in and decided to do the carrot seed also. I had a bit of a time with the carrot seed since it grows in bunches and isn’t nearly as easy to strip from the plant as sunflowers. Thats not even mentioning that the seeds are a bit prickly and cling to everything like small burrs. Who knew carrots were such a pain. I ended up with this much seed before I gave up on just put it in envelopes.

If you enlarge the pic by clicking on it you can see the prickly parts on the seeds. I also took the time to harvest the ‘ugly’ peppers from my pepper plants (bell pepper and hot peppers) and set them out to dry. I will usually leave the sun blemished peppers on the plant to make seed and give the ‘pretty’ peppers to friends and family. They look nice laying out in the sun, can’t wait to get the seed from these.

I like this place

Took the day off to go look at a piece of property yesterday. It’s a large parcel, around 80 acres, with a totally off grid house on it. It has a good solar array and a back up generator on premises, with another generator located by a small work shed. The house is nice, sits on the highest hill in the surrounding valley, and has a beautiful view of the valley lights through the hills at night. Some of the views from the house look like this.

Overall, a neat piece of property but at the asking price I was a little bit under-whelemed. Then we took a stroll around some of the acerage. There are some really nice parts to this property, lets hit the highlights.

Then I found out there were a couple of old mines on the property. I had to see them to see if they were just pits that someone calls a mine or more substantial. I’ve looked at a couple properties that have ‘old mines’ on them, usually backfilled and eroded to the point that they may be mines or may be a old trash pit. I was pleasantly surprised to be shown this.

Ok, looks like a mine. And anyone who knows me knows you wont be able to keep me out of it. Lol.

OOOOOh. Just inside the entrance the mine splits. Unfortunately the right tunnel ends fairly quickly, but the left side goes back 50 to 60 feet. It’s solid inside with good rock over the top and some side benches cut into the walls. You can see a big chunk of quartz laying there in front of the right path. The whole property is filled with veins of it.

Further down the left path you can see some old timbers and stuff. Overall, a pretty clean shaft. I didnt go all the way back because the owner didnt go in with me, he hung outside the entrance and I didnt want him to have to wait while I worked my way to the back face. I went in about 20 or 30 feet but I never saw the end, just more tunnel. The temp was nice and cool, the air dry, so I figure someone made me one hell of a root cellar if i bought the property. 😉

A pic from inside the left tunnel looking back out of the mine entrance. I didnt go see the other mine since we had already been looking at the property for quite a while and the realtor’s phone was going off constantly. I did however get walk by the tailing pile for it and I was impressed by the amount of material that someone had moved already. Based on the tailings, I’d say the other mine is as big or bigger than the one I went into. A pic of the tailing pile.

The property also has a small cemetery on it, another thing that is common on all these properties in the gold rush country. It’s one of the nicest private cemeteries I’ve seen, with a fence and nice marble markers. It’s in a meadow and I’m sure its really nice in the spring when the grass is green and growing.

Yup, I guess now I need to see if what they are asking is something I can manage.

More antiques

Well, I bought some more orphans. I have a bunch of orphans actually. Due to the ‘gold for cash’ craze lately, people are selling off every heirloom they can find for scrap and that includes old mechanical watches. I really (honestly) don’t understand selling a 100 year old mechanical device simply for a few dollars of gold, but since people do, the people who buy the scrap strip the gold (usually the case) and throw away the insides (usually damaging them in the process). Every so often a group of movements (what the mechanical inside of the watch is called) comes up for sale and I just can let them go in the trash or be destroyed by some Steampunk fool who has only a passing visual appreciation for the engineering and skill that went into these marvels. My latest collections of orphans…

The majority of these movements were made before 1924, running a basic serial number shows that one of them was produced in 1887 according to factory records. That one watch is 128 years old and has been around long enough to pass through the turning of two century marks (1900 and 2000). That one watch was created in a world powered by steam power, 16 years before man’s flight at Kittyhawk in 1903, before Henry Ford invented the Model T, and only a handful of years after Edison patented the lightbulb. And someone sold it for scrap to be melted down.

That is a pic of the back plate of the movement, with the Elgin name and the serial number in case you wanted to look up the year for yourself. As far as decoration goes, this isn’t a very pretty or detailed backplate, not like the later Elgin watches, but it is beautiful in its simple way. All of the gears and engineering were made on a factory floor that looks primitive to today’s standards and each watch was fitted and assembled by hand. Here’s a pic of the Hampden watch factory floor from around 1867 or so.

Oh, and just in case anyone was wondering, I put a few winds on the mainspring and it runs very nicely for 128 years old. The later watches had more detail to the plates, with fancy engraved fonts for the lettering and engine turned embellishments. Some examples….

Elgin SN: 10398880 – Year 1903

Elgin SN:27650937 – Year 1924

Waltham SN:13844616 – Year 1890

I don’t just save pocket watches either, I have several early women’s wrist watches, some of which I managed to save before the cases were scrapped. Overall, I have WAY more uncased movements than cased, but over time I plan on finding or making replacement cases. One of my favorite ‘saves’ from the women’s collection is this.

It’s an early Benrus watch from the late 1920’s in the original case with the original crystal. I can’t tell if the crystal has aged to yellow over time, or if it came with a ‘fancy’ yellow crystal that has faded. I can’t see why anyone would put a yellow crystal over the face though, since the silver and enamel work is rich in color when seen without the yellow tint.

All in all, this is probably enough for one post. In a follow up post I’ll go into more detail about preserving and fixing the watches and movements I have collected. Heck, if your lucky I might post a pic of my workbench and let you see whats in my drawers…..

WTF Wednesday

I woke up groggy and not feeling well this morning. I don’t understand cause I slept like the dead last night, but my Surge watch says I was awake 22 times last night. And then I saw this….

WTF is that on my ankle? I mean sure, I’ve woke up with some weird marks on me before but it’s usually due to the girlfriend of choice at the time. I live alone, have a good camera system around the house, and a good alarm system but occasionally I wake up not feeling well with stuff like this, nothing on the cameras or alarm. I guess it could be a spider… nope that would be 4 not 3 fang marks. Ummm, some other bug with a need to equally space out its bite marks on a 90 degree turn? I have no clue. A closer look shows blood spots in the center of each dot, definitely a puncture of some kind.

Anyone have an idea what would do this?

On another note, I like the WTF wednesday heading. Maybe I’ll turn it into a regular thing.

Another old radio saved

Everyone knows I’m an antiques junky, I don’t hide it, I’m kinda proud of it. I enjoy finding antiques in dis-repair and making them work again. I think part of it comes from being a system administrator and doing electronics design/repair. Too many of todays consumables are one use throw away stuff, while it can be fixed it’s more expensive than buying a new one. Not so with most things built before the 1960’s when most towns had a well known fit-it person who repaired everything from radios and tv’s to toasters. I should have been born then…… lol.

The latest radio to rejoin the working is my Atwood-Kent model 84. I didn’t repair this one myself since I just don’t have the time right now. Instead I let a good friend of mine (thanks Louis!) do the hard work on it. Over all not much to say about it other than it’s an 80W AM receiver made around 1932. The sound on these old radios is very different than you would expect from a normal AM radio, much fuller and more robust than the typical ‘tinny’ static like sound of todays AM radios. Then again, all they had was AM radio, FM not introduced until 1933 and the first FM station going ‘on air’ in 1937 (W1X0J).

I should have put the knobs back on it for the picture, didn’t realize they were off until just now. Oh, well. I don’t plan on refurbishing the cabinet, I’ll leave it ‘distressed’ with all of the age marks and such on it. I will give it a good cleaning with Murphy’s soap, and several applications of lemon wood oil to keep the veneer from drying out. Mostly I will just turn it on and listen to it like my other old radios.

If you are wondering what I listen to, it’s not local talk stations. I have a small AM transmitter I made that is connected to an mp3 player. I have a large playlist on the mp3 player made up of some digital recordings of my 75 speed albums with Bing Crosby, Glen miller, ect interspersed with archive newscasts from all of WWII. It makes for a very powerful listening experience if you are into that kinda thing.

In other news the air quality here has gotten worse. The fires are bigger and the weather pattern is pushing the smoke into the valley and compacting it. Heres a couple pics from around 10am this morning.

I guess I should say something about it being 9/11. I’m not playing the bagpipes at any functions this year, the band is but I haven’t been active with them for about a year now. Besides there are a lot of other people doing great commemorative things and they have it covered. Even one of my daily blog reads from Canada has a tribute. If you are interested in seeing it, check out MissK’s blog HERE.

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