Quartz Tester?

[JohnR725]

26 minutes ago, Plato said:

Give it time (pun intended!) I've noticed that the most common profession on here and the BHI is Electrical/Electronics Engineering so it might be an outdated generalisation?

maybe it is a current generation is more acceptable thing. With all their electronic gadgets they can't leave the house without having something that's running on a battery. 

But I do remember when I joined the national Association of watch and clock collectors. a lot of times I would avoid if people asked what I collected I'd say pocket watches. But from time to time to have fun I would say I collect quartz watches it was always interesting to see their reaction.

but this was a big Association at slowly shrinking. Which meant that there used to be I think two chapters that weren't electric timepieces. They even organized one of the national meetings in Chicago where the theme was electric timepieces. this is where I met Peter before he published his book he was still doing research.

 

[LittleWatchShop]

One simple feature of the Witschi and perhaps others is the glass/mirror viewer.  When I am working on a quartz watch, I find myself flipping the watch over testing for activity and (in the case of Timex) the indiglo function.

[LittleWatchShop]

Hey @JohnR725, can you post some closeup images of the Witschi probe receptacle?  I am curious about how they do that.  Is it an off the shelf type connector or something they manufactured themselves? 

I see where the probes can be purchased individually here.

[JohnR725]

On 9/12/2021 at 1:43 PM, LittleWatchShop said:

, can you post some closeup images of the Witschi probe receptacle? 

to be honest I never really looked at them and having looked at them it's quite a clever design.

If you look at the jacks found on the device they look innocent enough? Also photographed the end of the wire lead and the base of the wire probe we can see an initial of who made them and what the plug looks like. So this all looks pretty simple and straightforward kinda like a weird version of banana jack.  I suspect all of this was commercially made by somebody else and there is the link to what they look like.

https://www.jewelerssupplies.com/product9694.html

then for the probes you asked about their quite clever. The steel parts goes into the Jack and somewhere in there are springs to hold it in place. This is what's used to set your height adjustment. Then the arms carefully machines to hold the other part of the arm so it can rotate and still have contact. then the very end of the gold probe the little tip is spring-loaded.

[VWatchie]

On 9/6/2021 at 9:22 PM, LittleWatchShop said:

Most people I know either wear an apple watch or no watch at all.

Yes, it is a sad, sad world... 

And how can a wrist computer be called a watch? IMO, that is a prime example of false advertising. It should be prosecuted. 

[LittleWatchShop]

Great pictures @JohnR725.  Exactly what I wanted.

This is a very clever design for sure.  The "banana" like plugs are still a mystery as most banana plugs are closed at the bottom. 

The way the pogo pins are mounted on the slotted arm is  a good way to keep pressure on the tube for electrical contact.  This will be hard to copy but I will continue to ponder.  I have ordered some pogo pins to experiment with.

[JohnR725]

another way to do this would be the way Bulova did it.  I've attached an image of their universal movement holder.

 

[LittleWatchShop]

2 hours ago, JohnR725 said:

another way to do this would be the way Bulova did it

I think that would be more straightforward to copy, for sure.

[LittleWatchShop]

21 minutes ago, jdm said:

hat is the "proper" line release box, it may have additional functions

Interesting...so it can test crystals?  Who does that?  It would be easy to make a crystal tester (for functionality...not accuracy) with a hex inverter, a couple of caps, a diode and LED. 

Edited December 21, 2021 by LittleWatchShop

[jdm]

13 minutes ago, LittleWatchShop said:

Interesting...so it can test crystals? 

I have a bit of a problem imagining the average "quartz watch repairer" going to desolder the crystal, test it there and make progress from the result.
On the other hand probably the ideal all-in-one quartz tester doesn't exist. Various types have been presented and discussed in other topics. In the end I think everyone does according to his needs, aspirations, and budget. 

[ArizonTime]

By the way, I see quartz adjustments all the time on Spencer Klein's channel. He specializes in Seiko servicing, and he uses the Seiko QT-99 quartz tester that someone linked above. He adjusts lots of the Arnie divers from the 1980s using that tester, typically getting them down to a quarter second per day or less. Here's an example.

I don't know if those kind of adjustable movements are still used – those were H558 and H556.

That Seiko QT-99 tester was released in the 1970s. In the 1990s Seiko followed up with the QT-2xxx series with higher resolution (models were something like 2400, 2500, 2600). I think the difference was going from hundredths of a second with the QT-99 to better than milliseconds with the 2xxx models. It was all about the frequency of the oscillators in the testers. I don't know how they worked though – mechanical watch timing machines are acoustic, with microphones, but I'm not sure what the mechanism is with quartz watch timing machines (I don't think the cheap stuff cited on this thread are timing machines, just juice testers).

 

On 9/6/2021 at 12:22 PM, LittleWatchShop said:

In the US, I can write off a capital cost in one tax year, so if I spent the 2.5k, the fed would subsidize roughly 30%, so my out of pocket is more like 1.75k.

I get so confused by the way people talk about tax deductions and "write-offs".

You're not getting any of that money back. It's not a tax credit. If you spend money on equipment, that money is gone, as is the case when you spend money on almost anything. Writing it off just means you get to treat it as a business cost, but I don't know why we wouldn't start with the assumption that anything we spend on a business is a business cost – why wouldn't we be able to treat it as such? All it does is feed into your profit/loss calculation, reducing your taxable profit, which is the nature of a business expense.

The previous poster said it could be amortized as though this was a good thing – that just means you don't get to write off the full expense in the year you incurred it, which is a bad thing. It means that you could actually lose money in that year, but you would be taxed on "profit" that didn't exist because you weren't allowed to write off your purchase of, say, a Witschi. This is partially offset by amortized deductions in subsequent years – years where you don't have that purchase expense – but it drags out the write-off, which creates additional expenses and cash requirements.

If you buy a Witschi the only way to get the money "back" is with any revenue it generates. No government gives you that money back. It's a cost like benches and loupes and ultrasound, and you get to treat it as such in profit calculations, but your out-of-pocket is 100%.