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Hi, I'm Mark. I've been lurking on the forums for a little while now as I've been getting more into watch repair/restoration. Very much a hobby thing for me with a particular interest in oldish (60s/70s) chronographs. I'm hoping to be able to pick up some unloved pieces here and there and bring them back to life. This forum has been a great wealth of information for me, so I wanted to say thanks to everyone, and hello!

Well, I cheated and I'm glad. I had to remove and replace the mainspring on the Hamilton I'm working on 3 times but I finally got the T to fit both holes. I reamed the hole in the barrel and the top with a very small rat-tail file. I got the spring in but then the cleat on the arbour wouldn't stay in the slot at the end of the spring so I kind of put a very tiny wooden spacer in there to keep it in place. One day, after I'm dead, a watchmaker will see what I did and 'tch tch' me but I don't care. The watch works.

I understand you have to mix those two, but how do you actually do that in real life? I believe you have to make a large quantity (with some sort of seringe). Because if I count 100 drops of naphta, they will be gone by the time I finished counting

@Marc Funny, I was expecting 9010 for the pivots (instead of 1300), those devils are spinning! But I would be wrong (I checked the service sheet The big speed is a relative one (between each two in each set). The entire reverser wheel speed is quite slow, so 1300 will do! Thank you for that!

Lubeta or 9010 in naphtha for the reverser wheel pawls, D5 or 9104 (HP1300) for the reverser wheel pivots.

A 14kt Bulova Breton in VG to NM condition since that is my surname. But at this point I would take what I can get. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Mine is a NOS or nearly Seiko Pogue Sent from my Honor 5c

Thanks folks! I actually found the nawcc page which has the mainspring calculator. I was thrown out a bit when I looked at Cousins' listing where it was a case of deciding which parameter was least important - and assumed that an incorrect value would result in slippage. I know David Boetcher's site which is invaluable in many respects but hadn't stumbled across the link above as his site lacks a search engine. I'm really interested in this subject and have a vast number of watches here (literally) requiring attention of all kinds. I've had various involvements with many kinds of engineering albeit without any formal training. Most recently in IT, before that in analogue video electronics and before that with mining equipment. I'd be happy to offer an opinion to anyone needing to extract tracked vehicles from severe bogging. I'm well aware that working on watches is a very particular kind of challenge to take up so late in life...

you don't use D5 for the reverser wheels. I believe you need Lubeta.

Omega with water based top coat - soaked in destilled water with a few drops Fairy - brushed lightly every couple of minutes. Before After

Final stage should have been with progressively finer sandpaper but I skipped that and went to the final stage..polishing with Autosol metal polish. And this is the result. The gouge at the one o'clock area is no longer visible (in this pic you can see the badly worn case lug caused by the metal band). The holes on the right side of the case have been reduced to the extent that they're not visible to the naked eye. And the nick at nine o'clock is gone ...a few more pics of the case. Crystal has been polished with autosol as well. The case back cleaned up. Well that's the end if this polishing tale. No power tools were used, if you wish to use them be warned that its all too easy to remove too much material. In this case, by hand-polishing I managed to minimise the damage to the case lines.. not perfect but it could be a lot worse! As a bonus, the watch decided to start working again ! I like to think that this was the watch's way to show that it was happy to be all cleaned up but in reality it was probably just the old oils getting warm and allowing the movement to tick. Hope you enjoyed this write-up. Anilv