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Looking at this table the lift angles are incremented by 1 on each line, I suspect that this data was collated using a spreadsheet and who ever was entering the data dragged down from the first lift angle to the last. Default operation in situation is to increment by 1, not copy the digits down. Tom

Just bought myself an early birthday present. I've been eyeing Seiko 6139 series chronographs for a while, and finally enrolled in Mark's level 5 chronograph course. Been keeping an eye on eBay and the plan was to piece one together from various watches and parts, but then this 1972 6139-6012 came up in nice shape, with the railroad bracelet, and as far as I can tell a reasonable price. It'll be my first chronograph, so I'm looking forward to it!

The Dirty Time Corp "The Beatles" 404 watch was on the bench last night. The dial paint was starting to flake away around the edges and half of the red was missing from the seconds hand, so a little cosmetic touch up was required to stabilise the dial and freshen up the hand. Not much else to report. Its a cheap pin lever as expected, and it runs as well as you might imagine following a quick clean and lube, and was still ticking away nicely when I got up this morning. I presume the dial is a "homage" to the above. As to whether this is a genuine Beatles approved watch, or some blatant cashing in on Beatlemania, I'm still none the wiser. This was what it looked like when it arrived.

When I started, I thought Moebius oils were way too expensive and I still do think so. Having worked in and a lot with Germans, I know their work ethics; "Deutsche Gründlichkeit" and started looking into German watch-oils. Germany used to have an excellent, high standard Swiss compatible watch-industry until in 1945 (Februari 23rd) when Pfrozheim, in one of the largest (retaliation?) carpet-bombardment of WW2, was wiped out. Despite this, you can find very high quality stuff in Germany, also in watch-oils and this without paying the Swiss cartel prices. I've been using the German Dr.Tillwich synthetic watch oils ever since I started. Bought only once the highly touted Moebius "thixotropic" 9415 grease, but that turned out to be a poor performer compared to my Dr.Tillwich pallet-jewels oil. Of course, if you are working as a professional, you have to stick to the "industry standard"-oils, even if it was just to cover your *ss.

This week all the gear I needed to get started with Nickel plating arrived. A DC power power supply, magnetic stirrer, and nickel anode material. I made the Nickel liquid sulphate a couple of days ago and tried a piece brass rod. Seemed to work. Tonight I machined up a couple of dummy watch cases out of brass plus just a flat washer and set about cleaning and preparing them. The first piece I did with the following settings: First was 5v at 1A for 15 mins. Turned out ok. Plating was dull but polished up fine. second, slightly thicker and more reminiscent of a watch case I did at 6v at 1A - no good. Possibly not clean enough. I rebuffed and polished the nickel off and did it again at 5v and 0.8A for 15 mins and it was good - but still dull out of the solution - polished up nice though. third piece was done the same to verify settings. All good. my solution is a bit cloudy, possibly the cheap vinegar or cheap salt! Well worth the exercise as I have a degree of confidence an actual case will plate. Oh and each piece I turned half way through to avoid shadowing. Very happy and will only get better. A few pics attached:

Almost there! Just have to decide which case I'll be using. They both have pros and cons.

Not a watch, but a screw-head polishing tool. Offered on eBay as an auction, but the seemingly incomplete Lorch & Schmidt polishing set with a below mid-starting price got no bids, apart from my one in the last 5 seconds. However, only when enlarging the other sellers pictures, it seemed as if there were more collets hiding underneath the polishing disks and the polishing tool. This turned out to be the case. After quite some TLC of the parts and the wooden box, the set turned out to be like this; Less than 1/2 price than what these (be it fully complete) set are currently going for on eBay Three parts, for polishing screw-thread-ends, are missing ...... I can easily live with that

if you look at a Swiss package of a watch parts about the size of a postage stamp. Not a lot of room to write paragraphs of data so this is probably why at some point in time they adopted number schemes for naming components. But that often leads to confusions for people who are excited when they see their part number for whatever parts are looking for not realizing it's really a two-part system. You need a number that tell you like balance complete and then you need the actual number of the watch or some other equivalent number. so for instance in the beginning of the bestfit book they list all the part numbers several pages of them I just sniffed out the first image so you can see. what becomes interesting is if you look at Swiss watches a lot of models could come with several different balance wheels from standard to chronometer so there would be a difference in the balance wheel I assume someone is probably a difference in the number. In the case of Seiko their numbers would be very specific if it was a chronometer grade balance wheel. I was tend to think of that as the best fit number. because that is how they do things usually. so for instance I take that number at I go to bestfit online and ask for the cross reference I get the image which I have attached. Seeing as how the balance wheel doesn't cross reference to every single Seiko balance wheel existence it probably suggests that maybe it's a little different or special possibly higher grade.

I thought maybe it was a specific escapement lubrication. just in case you don't have it I do have the PDF specification. TK2213EN Type 1-3 oil.pdf

Welcome to the clock world, Karl. I just did my first American clock movement, a Waterbury, and it was a nightmare. While researching the Waterbury, I found several YouTube videos on Ansonia, which looked very similar to yours. I also found that Etsy had a surprising amount of vintage clock parts. Timesavers also carries a lot of clock parts. I learnt a lot about the Brocot escapement from a YouTube channel called Born Again Clocks. They also run an online watch and clock repair course called learntimeonline. And check out their webpage. https://learntimeonline.com/silver-senior-landing/ They are providing free training to seniors above 55! I'm considering signing up.

It's the Swiss part number

I have Mobeus 2010, D5 and Molykote DX. These are all recommended by Mark and others. £7.95 per bottle from ebay. Purchased 18 month ago. Will probably last my life time judging by the amount I have used to date.

Is 721/1877 just their reference? At the top it lists 310560 which is the correct Seiko part number (and you can find NOS on ebay)

Hi All This is a new one for me. Wyler Incaflex Navigator watch - I managed to get the case back off after a bit of treatment and scratching (literally) around, only to be confronted with a secondary case cover. Now I am unaware of the next step. The secondary cover is brass as opposed to the stainless primary cover. Can someone tell me whether this is a front load or is the cover supposed to pop off too. Other refurb videos I have seen - this secondary cover is a loose fit. There is corrosion/gunk around the seal so I am treating that too - but I don't want to force it. Any help would be appreciated - Pics below: Crisis averted! I managed to find a video from 2014 on YouTube which had a similar watch. The (plastic) bezel pops off and the movement came out the front! and... tada... it started running! Unbelievable. The movement looks good too. I do need a crown, which has a pocket watch style crown which goes into a slot on the stem. The crown is missing - so that's the next challenge!

This is my Cauny automatic from the 60's. I had it restored 10 years ago after my dad passed away.

Oh I forgot to mention--for anyone trying to get a detached bridle back into the barrel. I turned my mainspring winder upside down and carefully fed the bridle in through the slot on the side. I was able to gently slide it in by pushing with tweezers and pegwood while making sure it didn't pop out the top with a gloved finger. It was surprisingly easy. The hardest part was all the time I spent making sure I got the hook orientation right, as well as which end would overlap the other. Make sure your disassembly photos are better than mine! And don't forget to make sure the winder you choose for the mainspring is small enough to fit *inside* the bridle you just installed.

I’d like to think shelf life to mean exactly that, when it is good to be on the shelf, not after it’s already applied on the watch parts. Since most watches with synthetic oil could last up to 10 years between service, no oil could last that long if you consider shelf-life to include the time after it’s been applied on the watch. Natural, non-synthetic oil on the other hand, as with most things natural, they will go bad or at least degrade over time. While it may not be exactly 3 years of its suggested shelf life, I wouldn’t be so blatant to say the idea of shelf life on it BS.

These movements have what is called lantern pinions so the pivots do not need to be as well fitted in the pivot holes, but if it is obvious the hole is to big or worn then work will need to be carried out, unlike the fixed leaved pinions that you have in most other clocks such as the French type of movements. The weight of the pocket watch will give you an idea of the weight of the pendulum

It looks like a name "Chalmers" Pat 12.19.82 I found this link to the patent information: https://pocketwatchdatabase.com/reference/patent/269385/illinois-watch-regulator-regulators

I certainly will

I thought this brand of oil was banned from being mentioned on the forum. It was the first watch oil i used. On four restoration watches, within a couple months the oil was more gummy than a gummy bear

at one time horological lubrication did not have dates on the packaging like the bottle. That means you can buy oil on eBay a partially open bottle and safely use it because it has no expiring date. then if it was a natural oil you could ascertain its condition as to whether the oil was still fluid in the bottle as long as it was fluid you'd be okay. Synthetic oil tends to last forever so nothing to worry about here. A long time ago was on another horological discussion group. Somebody was talking about how they use D5 in their clock repair. There are using one bottle a month basically and a whole batch of clocks came back because of a lubrication issue. All traced to one bottle of D5. So one of the concerns was like the above example what if the oil from material houses not fresh. There is no way of telling whether a bottle has been sitting in the back shelf of the storage room for the last 20 years versus it was a brand-new bottle just got it yesterday. If you using lubrication with organic components which tend to go bad much faster you can have an issue like this but how much of an issue is it really if the entire months worth of clocks come back with angry consumers because your oil went bad for unknown reasons because there's no dates. fortunately for hobbyists you don't care about stuff like that but if you taking money from customers and you have a problem because of lubrication it's going to be an issue for you. On the other hand the good news for watch repair bad lubrication issues might not show up for five years in your customer will hopefully be long gone. and what about synthetic oil it's mostly good forever. That might explain why I purchased two bottles of Elgin oil off of eBay about a month ago. Synthetic oil that hasn't been made since the 60s but still highly regarded as a better product than what the Swiss currently make. Fortunately there is no expiring date so I don't have to worry about it. Although I am concerned about the choice of putting it in little squeeze bottles wondering if the plastic might disintegrate after all this time and contaminate my oil. oh and thinking of contamination that's another concern that companies have. Like how does the oil come out of the bottle sticking stuff into the bottle could contaminate the oil. Or the oil in your oil cups you ever change that? My favorite was somebody who was inspecting watch shops that they would send their work to and if you want to get this guy really excited don't put the oil cups bids down and maybe toss a dust bunny in. Because of course the stuff in the air falling out of the air into the oil can make an interesting grinding compound depending upon how much dust is in your shop. Which is why usually polishing should be done safely away from the open bottle of lubrication. what's the definition of plenty of oil? We end up with interesting problems in horology like it spans a very huge time.. That means our service literature art books the rules which we try to follow or not span a very long time and they change with time. for instance when I was in school the rule of lubrication was basically if you couldn't see that you lubricated that would be fine in other words Larry action holds oil in place and you should barely see it at all around your pivots. Except now we have Omega Rolex where their current role a thought is the previous rule is not enough oil at all. As long as you can see the top of your pivots you can flood oil all around it and that's considered acceptable. Whereas in school that would get your watch in the sawdust bin. I think some of what you're seeing is now the watch companies have taken away all the bad people servicing their watch which would be all of us. There are discovering that the rules were exactly right. Super minimalistic oil quantities conceivably will go away with time pivots will get ground that requires replacement of parts. Oh and that's a minor concern I have with watch companies recommending 10 years service intervals they also know that they're going to replace parts because they have them. So on a change we see is when the watch companies start to see what's really going on versus the perception of how stupid the watchmakers are. then probably the easiest way to deal with this would be to keep a Journal of your work. You get a watch you write down what you thought was wrong with it what you actually fixed in a notes timekeeping amplitude which is extremely important for this group who cares about timekeeping. Then time to time look at the watch put it back on the timing machine is it keeping the amplitude you perceive. Anything really weird with lubrication is now show up there. Well sort of? If you have a lot of metal on metal bearings in your lubrication goes away you might not see a decrease in amplitude until the pivots of ground themselves to dust like this happened with a lot of early automatic watches with metal on metal bearings lubrication disintegrated a happy customer or over the watch ran it for all those years not paying the greedy watchmaker and discovered that oh dear servicing is now expensive because their pivots are gone. Which is aided by the fact that watches that don't get serviced still have the original gaskets that are probably disintegrated moisture gets in another thought of why servicing should be done more often as to maintain the gaskets. So how about a different thought the other day somebody pointed out most of the people on this group is or are amateur and hobbyist. Basically implying that you don't have to follow the rules you can do whatever you feel like. So maybe a different lubrication recommendation I have two links you should bill a purchase this lubrication anywhere on the planet. The reason why there's two legs the first one I found is the best price but the second link looks just like the bottle I have it work. So John is a bottle at work but not to say why have a network but a case because it's at work it must be a good lubrication it's inexpensive it doesn't come from the greedy Swiss it doesn't have an expiring date and because everyone in the group is either a amateur and hobbyist it should be perfect for you. then yes I really do have a bottle at work and I was disappointed with it.. Then a course my test got interrupted because somebody at work took my watch and decided to use it as a practice watch which disrupted what was going on with it and that I got out of its container and got dust all over which didn't help at all. So much for controlled experiment but I was still disappointed because at the time I purchased it did have a reputation for doing something which it didn't do. But as were not concerned about anything other than cost expiring date and the cost is good and there's no expiring date then it should be an outstanding lubrication for you. Oh and just a reminder one of the times that Mark revised the rules of the message board I think he put a thing in where if you follow the advice and it doesn't turn out the way you think it's basically your fault. For some unknown reason I just thought I'd point that out I'm sure it doesn't relate to the quality of this product at all. https://www.ebay.com/itm/354699906622 https://www.ebay.com/itm/333318038741

I poster both Bestfit books ages ago on here for members to down load free.

This one, just today is coming from the country auction house...did I beat you? 'Ticking' supposedly...

Hello, I do it by hand and you can see in the picture, Thank you again

Well done. What does the first word say around the micro adjustment assembly please ? Might still be worth a disassembly clean and lubrication of the bearings of the two gears at some point when you feel confident.

Got a set of tiny screwdrivers today and the third smallest was just the right size to turn this screw. Just to be safe I turned it counter-clockwise to see if it would move and it did but that made the watch faster so I turned it in the clockwise direction to move the watch back to just a little slower than it was. I did a thing! Yay! Thanks for the confidence boost.

Finally back to work on these guys. I cleaned and inspected both movements, and will be using almost all of the parts from the second one, which was originally supposed to be the donor. The original shows a lot of wear and rust. The only problem with the second one is badly worn teeth on one of the automatic winding gears, but I was able to steal that from the other movement. The mainspring looks good, but I'm going to see if I can source one easily first. For a few bucks, I think this guy deserves it. Plus then I don't have to try to get the bridle back in

not having spelling mistakes isn't necessarily a improvement. Oh buttons did you a lot a smart phones have dictation software and you can just talk to your phone? Oh and the reference to spelling mistakes or lack of them is not aimed in your direction it's aimed in mine. I is dictation software with my computer and it makes interesting mistakes or choices of words sometimes. The words are all spelled right but well for the most part at least it's readable as long as someone grasp what you're trying to say hopefully that it's okay.

I can't get to that site, don't know what is wrong. Try this site. https://www.antiqueclockspriceguide.com/datingtrademarks.php