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Posted
16 hours ago, watchweasol said:

As the regulator is made of sprung steel any prolonged heat will anneal it and make it soft , laser welding such as carried out by He tor  would probably work.  But where you would get it done other than at a friendly jeweler I know not. Probably best sourcing a doner watch on eBay if possible.

Yes, I wondered about that effect of heat (braising would certainly requie it to be prolonged) but thought perhaps it wouldn't be that significant in this context. However, I'm wondering if I could use my mini spot welder to melt some solder quick enough to avoid any significant annealing effect (inspired by the dial feet soldering technique I've read about on here). BTW, your earlier advice suggesting that the balance cock mechanism could be gently prised apart was what gave me the confidence to keep trying. Thanks for that !

  • 4 weeks later...
Posted

Update: I've got the regulator functioning to the extent that the clock will run to time as opposed to being very slow & unadjustable due to the missing regulator pin. Having fashioned a replacement pin, the 'breakthrough' was to drop the idea of reattaching the smaller bit of the broken regulator ring & instead cut a coil from a spring of a similar diameter & attach that -trimmed to an appropriate length - to the piece carrying the boot & pin so that the latter assembly would move as required when the composite ring was fitted to the regulator arm. I used UV-cured glue to create the composite ring making the concentric joint in the plane of the ring so as to avoid creating a depth problem. It's obviously a bit of a mash-up & goodness knows how durable this hack will be but at least the owner will have a (temporarily!) usable heirloom pending success in locating a pukka replacement ring. 

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