watch – Twisted and Delusional

Dad’s Watch…

I bet you wonder what’s going on with the property. That will be another post. Lol.

Well, Dad brought out a watch my Grandmother gave him and asked if I could put a new stem in it. Seems the stem fell out and was lost a while back, so I said I would give it a look. The watch is a nice Bulova 11ALC in a factory slim case. Unfortunately, when I opened it I immediately saw the remainder of a split stem all caked in rust. The stem remnants look like this…

That isn’t something you want to see in a small mechanical device. The rust didn’t migrate too far, but it did get some places. Here is what the plate the stem is in looks like….

The rust had been building for a while, here is how much the case contained when I opened it…..

I’m on the hunt for parts now. Tom over at Dashto had the mainspring, several female stem halves in factory packages from Bulova, and a complete balance assembly. I don’t need the balance or multiple replacement stem halves, but I figured they wouldn’t hurt sitting in my parts bins instead of Tom’s. I have a replacement male half of the stem in my stockpile of parts so all I need now is a crown. I think Tom has Bulova crowns as soon as I measure the threads on the stem half.

If all goes well, I should have Dad’s watch repaired in a couple weeks or so.

Keeping Busy…

Posts have been few and far between since I have a few irons in the fire. I’m working on some emblems for a Datsun, the garden, finding rural property, a 3d printer build, and the usual clock and watch stuff. Yet, I still hear the question asked, “but you couldn’t find just a few moments to post…..?”

Lol.

The garden is growing well. I’ll post about that some other time. This year it’s garlic, tomatoes, corn, pole beans, squash, watermelon, and the usual herbs. The coffee is doing good, saw flowers for the first time this year but I’m not holding any hope for fruit.

I’m going to make this a quick post, so here’s a bunch of pics of the Datsun emblem progress. I’ve made a mold of the original and cast the first ‘waste’ piece from the mold. Now I need to cast a good piece to modify it the way the owner wants it.

On an interesting side note, I made some replica ‘Barracuda’ emblems for a friends car he was restoring. He only had a single good emblem and needed at least a pair for his car. The car has gone on to take many awards and is now in a recent Mopar magazine. The emblems are still on it, lol. Some pics of the reproduction emblems.

Complete, right down to the production numbers on the back and the company logo.

I also decided to challenge myself with an odd project. I purchased a large box of clockworks from ebay to have damaged clock parts to practice repairs on. 5 lbs of clock parts…… lol.

Also in that box was a severely unloved little clock movement that was almost complete, so I dug around and found a couple pieces that could make it complete with some ‘re-purposing’.

Someone has tried to ‘repair’ this movement previously. Here is a pic of one such ‘repair’.

Yup, a watch gear messily soldered to the back of the plate and drilled to make a pivot hole. didn’t even bother to file down the mess, unbelievable. Man is this thing full of gunk and dirt. I think they dipped it in clock oil and then left it in a dust-bunny colony.

A run through the parts baths make a big difference, check out the clean gears in the back compared to the still dirty gear in the front. Soon I’ll have the whole thing cleaned and ready to unsolder that hack job and do a real repair to the plate.

Ok, enough for now. I’ll post again when I can find the time.

Watch Bench

It’s another post from the watch bench, continuing on with the Lord Elgin watch. In the last post about this watch I disassembled it and put a new mainspring in the barrel, and you can see that post here.

This is the plate that most everything else in the watch movement attaches to. It has gone through the ultrasonic cleaner a couple times and a quick look at the jewels show they all look good, meaning there aren’t any cracks or jagged edges in the holes to damage any pivots that will be running in them. The next step is to put the gears (gear train) into the watch without breaking anything. This is a bit of a challenge for me still since it involves putting 4 small gears and a toggle into those jewels with steel pivots about the thickness of a human hair. Once you have them kind of aligned, you have to put a ‘bridge’ or support for the top of the gears in place aligning all the tiny pivots into the bridge.

In the animation above (if I remembered where I got this from I would note it here, but I don’t) you can see how the balance swings back and forth toggling the pallet with its two jewel fingers allowing the escape wheel to release one tooth at a time. I will be installing the jeweled pallet and escape wheel first.

Time to give it a shot.

Do you see the piece that was added in the picture above? If not, I dont blame you the part is about 3mm long and just under 3mm wide. Here is the same pic with the pallet and fork highlighted.

The pallet has it’s own cock to hold it in place, so that goes on next. It’s crucial to make sure that the top pinion on the pallet seats securely in the pallet cock and that the pallet swings freely from side to side against the banking pins.

The shiny plate with a jewel over the pallet is the pallet cock. It is in place, secured down, and the pallet swings freely. To make sure I installed it correctly I place the escape wheel in it’s spot and do a quick inspection of the pallet jewel clearances.

Now for the rest of the gears.

First off to get installed is the center wheel, which is what the minute hand attaches to, and turns one complete revolution every minute if all is installed correctly.

With the pinion from the center wheel protruding out of the other side I need to use a movement holder so I dont do damage to the shaft. Then I can install the third wheel next to, and under, the center wheel.

And finally the fourth wheel is installed connecting the escape wheel to the rest of the gear train. So far, so good, but next is the tricky part. Now I have to install the bridge on top of these gears and get the pinions you can see on the top of each gear lined up in its jewel hole.

There it is. Gear train and bridge is installed. I use a slight pressure from my tweezers to shift the center wheel back and forth to make sure the gears all move freely and nothing is binding.

As a side note, while I worked on this part of the watch I realized I am completely out of my home made raspberry mead. This is completely unacceptable and the next post will probably be this weekend with details of how to make your own raspberry mead. Raspberry mead… watches…. now all I need is a spirited red-headed woman for company….. lmao!

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……

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.

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…..

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