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.