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Here's a couple of watches from my collection. An IWC Mk11 and a '56 Longines 6B/159. I mainly collect military watches.

No point to my post, Tony - just a joke en passant... Cheers, Will

Nice one, lol. Well, I don't have that special "xxx" watch yet however, I will now be forced into telling you;) I went nuts on Ebay over the past several months and bought WELL over 150 watches for repairs/my collection. (some working/just needed servicing) The amount of money I spent on ALL of them is the equivalent of just a few hundred pounds since most of you are in the UK. It may sound like a lot but it's not....I service watches every single day after work so I need to keep the ball rolling if you will. I love doing it too so it's a win win! :woohoo-jumping-smiley-emoticon:

* As I said a day or two ago, Helvetia's a great make. Bargain! * And I wanted to put this post in the Helvetica font - but it's not in the forum font list!

I wanted to show off my newest tool purchase. Yes, it is the elusive platax tool. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I agree with the jealousness as I have wanted one for a few years now. I got it out of a watchmakers estate. Thank you geo I checked all the ends as they can get plugged. I don't think this was ever used as it still had a light oil on the disk and absolutely no marks on it. I think I may sell my k&d staff removers to help pay for this baby. I have to say it works amazing. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Why did i add a "C" who knows not I. I do like yours was it of the bay and if it was why didn't I see it.

Just to clarify a few things ... Watch-O-Scope, and any other purely PC-based watch timer (i.e. not something like MicroSet, which has its own calibrated hardware to do the timing), uses the crystal oscillator in your PC's sound card, not the one for the CPU itself. This oscillator is supposed to work at 44,100 cycles per second. (That's a simplification; it actually works at a much higher frequency, and is divided down depending on the sample rate of the audio being played, or the desired sample rate for recording, but 44,100 is one rate knwon to be supported by all sound cards, since it's the standard rate for CD audio). Unlike the crystal in your quartz watch however (usually 32,768 cycles per second), the sound card rate doesn't need to be all that accurate. If it were off by 0.1%, it would result in a pitch error (when listening to music) of about 2 cents (there are 100 cents between two adjacent notes in a Western chromatic scale). There are very few people in the world who can perceive that small of a pitch error, and most musical instruments aren't even tuned that accurately. Many pop singers can't even come anywhere near that. However, if a program like Watch-O-Scope is using that oscillator to test a watch (by counting the number of cycles from one tick to the next), a 0.1% error is a lot. How much? 86 seconds per day! That's why Watch-O-Scope has a rate correction setting. With the rate correction setting initially left blank, testing a highly accurate watch (which for the purposes of adjusting a mechanical watch, almost any quartz watch would be) will show how much error is due to the sound card. If you test your 0s/d quartz watch and Watch-O-Scope tells you that it's gaining 30 seconds per day, then we know that the sound card oscillator is wrong by 0.035% (30 / 86400 x 100 = 0.035). By telling Watch-O-Scope what the reading is from your assumed-to-be-accurate quartz watch, it then knows what the error is in the sound card's oscillator. That 30 seconds a day correction tells Watch-O-Scope that your particular sound card oscillator is really oscillating at 44,084.7 cycles per second (if according to the sound card your accurate watch is fast, it means that really the sound card is slow). Now that Watch-O-Scope knows the actual frequency of your sound card's oscillator, it can be used to to measure the actual frequency of something else (like your ticking watch). What makes this usable is that most sound cards are relatively stable. Part of this is just that on the scale of mechanical watch timing errors, crystals are pretty stable. Another factor is that the inside of the a computer, once warmed up, is generally at a pretty steady temperature, especially if you have temperature-controlled cooling fans. Now let's look at the effect of sound card accuracy on beat error and amplitude. The beat error is (half) the difference in spaces between ticks from one tick to the next. Another way of looking at it is if you consider every second tick to be correct, how far are the ones in between from where they are supposed to be. This is of course measured by the same sound card oscillator cycles as the watch's rate. However, reasonable errors in the oscillator don't really matter at all for this measurement! Imagine that your sound card's oscillator was off by a whopping 1% (an error that would be detectable by most musicians). Even worse, imagine that it were fluctuating back and forth between -1% and +1% every few seconds (an error that would be audible to almost anyone; remember wow and flutter on tape players and turntables?). That would make the sound card useless for measuring daily rate, but it would have almost no effect on beat error and amplitude measurements. Why? Because 1% is 1%. +/-1% of a day is +/-864 seconds, which would make daily rate measurements pointless. But +/-1% of a 1.5ms beat error is +/-0.015ms. That means a measured beat error of 1.5ms could be anywhere from 1.485ms to 1.515ms. But those would both still display as 1.5ms, since Watch-O-Scope (and other timegraphers I know of) only display one decimal place. So, sound card error doesn't really matter for measuring beat error. Likewise, a 1% sound card error isn't going to affect amplitude measurement either. In fact, it won't affect it at all. The formula for calculating amplitude involves (among other things) dividing the lift time by the total time between ticks. Since both times will be wrong by the same percentage (unless the sound card oscillator is varying really fast), the error will cancel out. To really know how accurate and stable your sound card is, a GPS one-pulse-per-second output fed into the sound card would be ideal. You could run Watch-O-Scope for hours, watching for fluctuations (or use the long-term test feature if you have the Pro version).

You can make your own GPS calibration unit to calibrate your PC sound card: http://protyposis.net/clockdrift/high-precision-audio-drift-measurements-with-gps/

the only answer to this problem is to always wear a cheap fake. when you get taken. it won't hurt so bad. :D

Porno! Where are those XXX watches? :D Sorry I couldn't resist! But you don't need to buy broken, look in here: http://meranom.com/ http://www.poljot24.de/en/ http://chistopolcity.com/ Warning though, I've never purchased from them but some members here I believe have use some of them. Cheers, Bob

Very nice, I've a friend with one of those, he won't sell it . I got one of the more basic ones, got it from a fleas market ,as a non runner. Broken winding wheels, I managed to repair it eventually. It turns out it came out of a hurricane aircraft, I made a stand for it and now it sits on the side in the spare room. Pictures if any wants me to try posting them.

If you bought these on Ebay, we have been bidding against each other often. I recently purchased xxx amount of watches there and cannot stop. So yes, you're not alone! Watchaholics anonymous will no longer accept me :startle:

I've got about 30 years experience behind me as a watch maker and a clock maker. So if I can help in any way just ask.

Hi Hiren, I've just taken delivery of the course materials and first impressions suggest that this is going to be a great course. I've studied with the OU for a long time and the BHI course units are on a par if not better! Clear diagrams and colour photos - excellent! I signed up for the Timezone course a little while back but was disappointed with both the materials and tutor - this course is like night and day. Do you plan to get a lathe, if so which do you plan to get? I agree with others here in that the initial outlay is big but my other hobby is RC Helicopters and that also has quite a big entry fee . Look forward to hearing how you get on. Regards Bob

I think this topic is all b******t. I had a bath and put on my best Rolex and didn't get seduced once. Why?