Leaderboard

How to look cool when mowing the lawn - outstanding. Of course Pilot style sun glasses would also have been essential and a leather Levi waistcoat plus jeans. :D

I came across these pictures of what turned out to be my trickiest job.........ever! The watch is a Goliath pocket watch and the problems were:- Staff broken at one end. Hairspring distorted and contaminated with super glue. Being a Goliath, I thought the staff might just be large enough to allow me to make a repair by re-pivoting, after all the shaft was 1mm diameter. So decision made, I dug out my watchmakers lathe, some pivot steel and a 0.5mm carbide drill. It was more than fiddly to make, but I did succeed on my second attempt. The first thing I did was to strip down the balance wheel and leave the hairspring soaking in acetone to dissolve the superglue that was binding the spring. I then mounted the wheel complete with staff still attached into the lathe and bored out the end of the shaft. It was a bit like mating hedgehogs! That done I turned down a piece of hard pivot steel using a carbide tool before polishing and fitting to the jewel. I decided to turn the steel when in the hard state to save me the bother of softening it and then having to harden and temper it. The new pinion was then fitted to the staff. To ensure correct alignment, the staff was held in the headstock of the lathe and the new pinion in the tail stock. I applied a tiny drop of Loctite 386 high strength retaining compound to the hole in the staff then slid the pinion into the hole by sliding the tail stock along the lathe bed. When cured the pinion was rock solid and in perfect alignment. Now I turned my at tensions to the hairspring. The acetone had done the trick, the spring was now perfectly clean. I pushed and pulled, prodded and twisted and eventually managed to get the spring back in shape. I now fitted the spring to the staff in its original position and fitted the assembly to the balance cock. This assembly was then fitted back into the movement, and started to tick away quite nicely. After minor adjustment, it is holding about eight seconds a day. Here are few pictures, the last picture shows the watch running, hence the blurred balance wheel.

Never demagnetize a quartz/electrical watch though!

Well done Geo, another piece of our history saved from the bin. You will be moving on to springing and timing next. :thumbsu:

Clocks are just geet big watches - can almost hear the gasps of indignation and horror (;-))

'Yer 'tis - doing a proper job...

I remembered this thread and couldn't resist and post a picture of a friend's bike... :D