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I can remember my father telling me why he never wore rings at work. He was a turbine engineer and obviously working around serious electricity. He said he saw a guy lose two fingers when electricity arced through his rings. I don't know which fingers they were, hopefully he could still make a victory sign or whatever. I am in the process of making a variable power supply for use when testing accutrons. Converting a schematic to use on a linear board - such fun. Luckily someone posted the schematic on an accutron site so here's hoping I get it right. Really interesting post svorkoetter.

This week I took delivery of a www.brunelmicroscopes.co.uk BM1 long arm microscope. Several of you where interested in this & how I got on so I thought I'd do a review. bear in mind its written after only a couple of uses, by someone who has a few years experience on quartz but only 6 months experience on mechanical watches. Image from brunelmicroscopes Cost (including post & vat at time of writing) £219.60 First impressions where pretty good, for a couple of hundred pounds you get a well made, heavy & positive feeling microscope. you get a nice cover & some additional madnifications You can adjust the eye lenses to suit your eyes & adjust the long arm in various directions. I found three faults with the microscope, the first is if you swing the arm by 90 degrees the base is not weighty enough to support it & the unit tips over this means you have to pretty much use it directly inline with the base which gives a more limited space under which to work, especially if you adjust the eyes to suit a seated position, although once I got going I didn't notice it, it was enough. The second issues was the light got pretty hot & it didn't half make me jump when I touched the back of my hand on it, which being made to jump when your talking watches isn't the greatest of news is it! but I think this is only a matter of getting used to it as a set up The third issue was the quality of the lenses as you can see they look quite cheap & Chinese nasty & I'd like to have perhaps had something to put them in to keep the dust out of them. To work with the microscope is a joy! I mean a serious joy! my hand was a lot steadier, things where more precise. changing lense is a simple case of sliding one out & sliding the next in I found with the angle i'd set the eye lenses to gave me about 10cm of work space, which was more than enough, I didn't foul with the microscope at all. the first job I did with the microscope was to change a date when on a 255.411 from the white it was supplied with to a gold one from the watch I was repairing & I have to say I have never found doing a piece of work on a watch so pleasing. the preciseness So all in all, as a user you can see & feel this is an entry level stereo longarm microscope, but its still a long, long was out in front of an eyeglass/loupe and is a sound investment for an intermediate user & I would throughly recommend one at this price I'd give it about 7.5 out of 10. Lee