Leaderboard

I bought an anonymous 4-sided wristwatch movement vise on ebay over 10 years ago. "GERMANY" stamp on the thumbscrew and "GH" awkwardly engraved on both dies. I like it a lot better than most of my other movement holders, so, I threw together a 3d printed version in hopes that others might find it useful. The main innovation vs. most others is that the dies are slightly undercut where they grip the main plate, which seems to greatly improve their ability to hold on. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5275367

Hi. I am also a beginner but one tip I picked up which often helps is once the bridge has been placed on top of the wheels with all its screw holes lined up, is to with the blunt end of tweezer tap the movement holder a few times rotating is as you go, doing this I often find most if not all the pivots have miraculously found their way into the jewel hole without any extra fiddling.

Surely they are not. It's normal for beginners to have trouble, even major one, bringing all pivots into the bridge. This is often asked, however repeating the answer one more time, there is no magic to it. First and most important is that you have the work very high as in shoulder or neck high, and your elbows resting on the bench. You need to see what you're doing, get an appropriate loupe. You can also try with one wheel at the time, then add one after another, and learn how to make tiny adjustments to the top of the arbor or pinion with the tip of the tweezers or a toothpick, from a side.

To save money these mov.ts used pressed posts and rivets, reduced parts count and more weird things. They are built very much unlike a normal mechanical watch. Not made to be taken apart and even repaired, the specifics of this simple fact do change from a model to another, but in the end they are an even poorer choice than a quality ETA for a beginner. If you enter Timex in the search box above you will get all the explanations and tips from the folks that know how to work on them.

The watch has no brand to speak of. The mov.t seems to be an AS1726 with modified bridge design and execution, something that was very common. It could also be some sort of copy. This type of search is done on the ranfft database, filling the checkboxes that apply, then visually comparing results.

I agree with @rodabod - it's worth buying a good movement holder like Bergeon. And the cheap presto tools are poor. I prefer levers. The three tools its worth spending more on, initially, are (or you will just end up buying better ones) , movement holder, tweezers (e.g. Dumont) and screwdrivers. As it's your first watch strip down, I think there's a high risk of you damaging it, and it's quite a nice watch. I'd suggest buying a cheap non-automatic movement to practice on (<£10 on ebay). Manual wind Swiss with 15Jewels would be a good start.

Would you post the URL by chance.

If you still like this kind of work, even after losing a tiny part and seeing a broken balance pivot, then surely it was meant to be. May I ask for pictures of the movement and especially the balance and its pivot? We can help much when we see them. The best and clearest pictures you can make. You will see a lot of broken balance pivots in this line of work. It is good you are learning about them now. Let us see pictures and learn more and we will help how we can.

Caliber No is traditionally stamped on the movement, usually under balance. You need a staking set and plenty of practice restaffing a balance. See vids by Mark lovic on youtube. If available a balance complete is your best bet for now. Regs

The second does look like one of the pivoting tools. The right hand side centre would be hollow and you would put a pivot drill through it, while driving the wheel from a loose pulley wtih a pin over the left hand female centre; normally with a bow as with the Jacot tool. There's a video of a more modern one being used here:

A helpful tip for anyone looking at this discussion? I snipped out an image found up above a typical newbie mistake? People usually reassemble the watch in the opposite order they took apart. Usually what I'll notice is they put the pallet fork in right at the very beginning and that's a big mistake. Yes you can put it in but you don't have to. If you don't have the pallet fork in you can verify that the gear train spins. It makes it a lot easier to put the wheels back in if the pallet fork is not there. So typically you put it in just before you put the balance wheel in makes things a lot easier.