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The Patek Philippe pocket watch arrived with a number of problems. The most serious was that the escape wheel arbour was snapped off. General view of the movement The broken escape wheel arbor The biggest problem was that the arbour had broken off flush with the escape wheel pinion, a worse case scenario, leaving me no arbor stub to use as a alignment guide for drilling. So in order to install a new arbor I had to drill freehand with no guide. Here's the escape wheel mounted in the lathe, where I used a grave to cut a center v-notch to guide the drill. Next up was the drilling, the drill measures 0.25mm in diameter and standard practices is that the hole is 3X the diameter, so I drilled down 0.75mm deep. Holding onto and drilling a hole with a 1/4 of a mm drill is a big challenge, it's only 4 times thicker than a hair, so not much pressure is needed to snap it in two. Here's a better view of the 0.25mm hole I drilled. Next up was fabricating a new replacement arbor, I did this using silver steel, and made it oversize so that I could adjust it for a perfect fit. The diameter of the arbor is 0.35mm and the pivot is 0.11mm. Checking the pivot diameter. Replacement arbor on top, old broken one on bottom. A small dab of Loctite was applied to the part of the arbor that would be press fitted into the escape wheel, then the new arbour was carefully tapped in place and seated and aligned. With that taken care of, the escape wheel was installed in the movement and I measured how much of the tip of the pivot I needed to remove for a perfect fit with the required end shake. Here's the pivot sticking out of the jewel with the cap jewel removed. And here's the view with the pivot trimmed in length and sitting just below the jewel. There were a number of other issues with the movement, but I always start with the most challenging. With the new arbor in place and the escape wheel fixed, I went on to the other defects, which will have to wait till another day.

I like it very much and may even create one myself as its all I seem to be able to do with watches, thake them apart and not be able to put them together again. Thanks for the Idea Rogart63. :bow:

Another point to make here is that I would encourage you to grab some of the compounds, wheels and mops and simply practice. You will develop technique by trial and error. Practice on old watch cases if you can. This way you will get a true feel for what effect each compound has, and experiment with different types of wheels and mops. Get some of the tape as well and practice graining. This is the ONLY way you will become a competent polisher, even with the fantastic advice from the above video and the advice from our esteemed members here. When I first started polishing I used to push the work in and cause the kind of damage perplxr was talking about, it took me lots of practice to develop my style of polishing which gets me by, and I am by no means a professional polisher. These days I get great results by using quality compounds and almost tickling the workpiece against the wheel to get rid of scratches. The same old mantra applies practice, practice and practice. :)

So install the software on a netbook which has a minor problem of the screen is too small and toolbar on the bottom covers up the very bottom of the screen. I think there’s a way of making the toolbar disappear I just haven’t had time to look into that. So left everything on default other than changing the lift angle for the particular watch I was timing. So outstanding that the software is out to play with. Then there have been other Windows-based timing machines in the past none of which worked very well so I made this amplifier to play with the other software. So this is a dual op amp design with a little bit of filtering.

Hi Will, and thanks for the warm welcome. I was fascinated by the movement photos of mechanical chronographs I was watching on forums and websites (hodinkee.com is one of my favorites) and I decided to take the plunge, but starting from a chronograph that I could "understand"... This is why I bought that Landeron 248 movement. Here's the link to the thread on my blog regarding it: <<forum rules please>> I am not still done with it, as I said some parts are missing, but I also made some videos: As I said, I am not good at making videos either, so bear with the shaking camera and the out of focus moments... :P

Ice cube tray for me....