antique – Page 2 – Twisted and Delusional

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…..

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…..

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: