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……