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Showing content with the highest reputation on 07/09/22 in all areas

  1. 6+ months since I stared this hobby Thoughts Rewarding? Yes. Frustrating? Yes. Learning curve. Easy, because of YouTube videos. Hard, as a result of physical expertise. 'Ping' and 'Slip' make for great skill retention. Cost. Cheap but expensive. Cheap, in that the tools are not all that expensive. Expensive in that a lot of items are needed to gain expertise. Maintenance of expense. Initial purchase of tools to keep cost down does work, only a few need replacing as more experience is gained. However the need for explicit tools makes the expense demanding. Biggest expense. Watches and movements. Watches to be worked on, movements and spares to repair the watches and to replace the 'pinged' parts. Biggest benefit. Mark Lovick's course. Comment Watch Repair Talk forum is excellent. All the help I could need was freely given. YouTube videos make learning enjoyable. My mistake is the amount of knowledge and skill needed to service even the easiest watch. Too many watches. Had watches as a youngster. I'll get another one of each and do them up. Wrong. I've owned number of Swiss watches, Didn't realise that movements were not specific to the name of the watch. Could I help a beginner? Not in learning, as I am still a newcomer. However I would like to make an observation. It would have helped considerable if the 'trainers' offered this advice. Hello, welcome. It's a great hobby. Consider beginning on one watch only. Don't get to many. All are the same, but vastly different. There are many YouTube video'ers who offer great tutorial. But stick to one watch. 6 months down the line. What would I do different? As above, but would have made a note of the watches I owned. What ones were working and those that were not. Keep a log of the watches that I have worked on. Note what is damaged and what is replaced. Saves duplication in purchases. Why buy a movement when you already have an old watch with the same movement. Keep a note of expenditure. My watch purchases were double my tools??? Will I stop? Heck, no. Beginning to understand the rudiment. Long way to go. Started to have learned earlier? 73 yrs young and I've still got plenty of time left. Onward and upward. Regards to all. Ross
    4 points
  2. It would be the mainplate, winding stem, setting lever and setting lever screw. No charge for those, I'll just pop it into a letter envelope. If that works just pm your address.
    2 points
  3. Any contribution that anyone makes will always help at least one person so that in itself makes it worth doing .
    2 points
  4. You already have Ross with this post matey.
    2 points
  5. Hmm.. so one spends very little for a bit of bling, but expect to get an hidden gem? These are just humble fashion items, seller is a charity, I would be embarrassed asking for a refund.
    2 points
  6. The magnet doesn't need to be very strong. I made a movement rest for assembling quartz movements with a small whiteboard magnet and a couple of ice lolly sticks. The magnet holds down the coil and the rotor and stops them from misbehaving.
    2 points
  7. Gosh! It's nice to know others like me are out there at roughly the same stage. I retried. Got bored. Get a hobby. Using Udemy. Learned Databases, then Excel. Photography using Serif Affinity. Completed a digital Photography course with Affinity Revolution. Then came Covid. Learned Video Editing using Vegas Pro. 2 years without leaving our parkhome site. All of these courses cost only about £15 each. Great value. Computing is ok, but does not give a sense of achievement. Trawling through Youtube, saw a tutorial on watches. Wow! Bought a book. Like Paaul 80, I'm dyslexic. Read and read and read and read. Have no understanding of what I have read. Visual is the way for me. This is my work area. The mouse mat has now been replace by a proper mat. The box saves 99% of the 'ping'. Recently purchased mobeus oils, 9010, D5,and Molykote DX from ebay for under £30. Keeping the faith. Regards Ross
    1 point
  8. If you can't shift them with a good fitting driver I doubt it's thread lock, sounds more like they used super glue instead of thread lock, by accident because someone picked up the wrong bottle or by design because you pee'd someone off, heat or a drop of acitone on the screw heads should soften it enough
    1 point
  9. Welcome to the 6 months club, we must have started about the same time. For me it's not a good hobby to get into, I have OCD along with other memory issues, I have spent far too much on tools in such a short time. Apparently I am a collector of tools not watches although I do have a few of those as well all bought broken and all fixed and working but not a collection, but oh those tools I can't get enough. Just about to place another order for more. If you have OCD find a cheap hobby, now find a cheap hobby because I can't and I have tried loads over the years, Photography, Fishing, Radio controlled planes, radio controlled cars, radio controlled boats, carpentry, Model Railways, Military Modelling to name just a few and a small fortune spent and lost a small fortune on them all. I still do a couple of them but hope Watch repairs is the last new one, well swmbo hopes it's the last.
    1 point
  10. Here is mine on the bench with some of the case removed for access.
    1 point
  11. Greetings Ross, I could sense that you've been frustrated. You've been at this a month or two longer than I have and I don't feel like I'm where I "should" be but I'm OK with how it's going. One thing I did was to keep a running spreadsheet of everything I spent (including shipping) and it's been quite a bit more than I would have imagined AND I haven't purchased a time grapher or mainspring winders. I think rather than suggesting that we start with a pocket watch (because they're larger) the suggestion should be to start with a watch that is running. When we start with a 100 year-old pocket watch: You first have to diagnose why it isn't running - as beginners we don't have the skill to do so. You often have to find parts, the obvious way might be to purchase but that doesn't work on a 100 year-old watch so you're left with trying to find a donor movement that is EXACTLY the same (even then you need to know about variations that may have been made over the production years). There should be some way to get 50 drops of he right oils needed to do the first watch you're working on. Spending $200 to get 5 bottles of Moebius is stupid. Hang in there! - Gary
    1 point
  12. Thanks Kalanag - I’ve done that and can apply plenty of torque - so much that I’m worried about twisting off the screw head. But the screws just won’t move - yikes! I don’t know what they’ve done to wedge them in so hard - but JDM wondered about thread lock and I’ll explore the heat solution tomorrow when I crank up the soldering iron.
    1 point
  13. Tell her to buy a swatch moonwatch. She can have the whole thing made of plastic for 20 x that.
    1 point
  14. Hiya Goose. Yes kalanag is quite correct. The rotor is a little shit and behaves extremely badly and should be sent to it naughty corner. Haha. I can confirm that you will need a strong magnet under the mainplate directly under the rotor. Generally it makes the rotor stand up straight to attention and if the magnet is large enought to cover the area of the other train wheels all those join in the parade as well. Ideally greg a Neo button magnet. (Neodymium ) works very well. Get 2 they are great fun. 2 of these 12mm magnets held together by their opposite poles are quite difficult to seperate by hand. Hilarious watching the missus try to seperate them
    1 point
  15. I read this thread with interest. Are we talking about a new Janta machine or used.. The reason I raise this is I purchased the very basic model some three years ago and it has washed lots and lots is watch parts and sometimes small clock parts faultlessly..My machine has no timer so I use a kitchen timer. I purchased this machine as an interim machine until I repaired my L&R Vari- Matic. The L&R is still in my garage and to be honest I can not see the difference in cleanliness of the parts between the two machines. Perhaps I have just been lucky..
    1 point
  16. 1 point
  17. Yeah, I was originally looking for a used one before I bought the Janta but didn't have any luck. I'll be keeping an eye open again. I really don't want to have to "fix" up something though, and a lot of what I see on ebay are units that have something broken.
    1 point
  18. I wouldn't go by the readings your app is giving, I have tried it a few times both with the phones inbuilt mic and a few plugin options an not once has it given results anywhere near the readings my low end timegrapher gives, I use the old Weishi 1000 which works well. Using a marker pen put a small mark on the balance then film it in slow motion, most modern smartphones can do slow motion videos, then watch the playback and see what the actual amplitude is by seeing where the little mark swings to in both directions, you may find it's a lot more than the 100 you app is reporting, hopefully, if not then as others have said above, eather a very weak mainspring or something a little tight in the gear train.
    1 point
  19. A carefully smoothed steel spacer is better than 3D printed PLA. The plastic releases tiny wear particles which stick to the mainspring. A nylon filament might work better than PLA.
    1 point
  20. Hi I would fit a brass spacer to correct the height, Brass is a little more forgiving than steel and if you have access to a lathe easily made
    1 point
  21. Balance staffs can be repivoted. Of course if a replacement staff is available that's the best; and in my experience there's no real time advantage to repivoting over making a new staff if no staff is available. Actually, I often make staffs even if there's theoretically a replacement available, simply because there are often more than one possible replacements, and you might not know which is the good one, and the supplier might send the wrong one, and by the time you've tracked one down and get it installed for me at least it's faster to make one. I'm not great at searching for parts, haha.
    1 point
  22. A week ago, I measured an ETA 2824-2 housed in a Sinn 556 A watch, and the results were pretty amazing. I published the results in this post. Anyway, this made me reflect more deeply on the performance of Russian watch movements which I appreciate so much, and here follows my reflection. I have always maintained, and I still do, that Russian movements such as Vostok, Poljot, and Raketa are an excellent option for the beginning watch repairer. The reasons for this are several. They are all Swiss in their basic design. That is, they all use the Swiss lever escapement, but compared to Swiss movements like ETA, Sellita, Unitas, etc., they are usually just about a tenth of the cost of their Swiss counterparts when it comes to movements and parts. The beginning watch repairer is essentially bound to make mistakes resulting in lost and damaged parts, but when the cost is counted in cents, rather than in dollars, it doesn’t hurt anything but possibly one’s pride. Add to this those Russian watches can be very fun and cool in their design (like the Vostok Komandirskies) and ingenious in their function (like the Vostok Amphibians) and there’s very little speaking against them. Perhaps best of all is that once you have built up your skills and experience it will basically be no different to take on any Swiss lever escapement movement, like the famous ETA 2824, to name just a single example. So, aren’t there any downsides to these Russian calibres? Indeed, but not so much for the beginning watch repairer where the overall goal is essentially to be able to take the movement apart, clean it, lubricate it, and assemble it. In those cases, getting the watch to run reasonably well again, without introducing errors is definitely a success and very educational. No, the problem with these Russian movements arises when you have become proficient at servicing and repairing. Why? Because you might be thinking (like I pretty much did), that once you’ve serviced it to (near) perfection, it would perform better than from the factory, but of course, it won’t. So, when putting it on the timing machine its performance will still not show the kind of results that you would usually get from a healthy Swiss movement, and that makes it a lot harder to assess the success of the service. I remember @Endeavor once remarking to me when I was frustrated over a Vostok movement that I was working on, that “a Vostok is not a Rolex”, but the remark passed me by at that time. However, finally, the penny dropped. You might even have burnished the pivots, and adjusted the end shake and side shake to perfection (like I have). Still, the timing machine results are erratic. The rate and amplitude vary in a single position, and the positional errors can be quite dramatic. The reason for this, I would very much suspect, is that the manufacturing of Russian parts is far from perfect. The train wheels might be slightly skewed, the wheel teeth and pinions leaves not perfectly designed, cut, and polished, the staff pivots not equally rounded, the balance wheel rather sloppily poised, and so on. So, in my experience assessing the success or failure of a service/repair on a Swiss movement is generally far less challenging. Nevertheless, these Russian movements can be regulated to be very accurate, provided they’re worn and wound consistently. I’ve had Vostok movements averaging like quartz in accuracy. In this respect, Swiss movements (and high-quality Japanese movements) are much more forgiving. That is if you don’t wind a Swiss movement consistently and/or store it overnight in different positions it won’t affect the timekeeping as much as it would for a Russian movement. So anyway, when you can pick up a 200 meters water resistant brand-new all stainless steel Vostok Amphibian diver watch for less than a $100 I’d say it is still a fantastic option, and eBay is full of these Russian movements and parts for basically next to nothing when compared to their ditto Swiss. In conclusion, Russian watch movements are a great start but don’t expect the precision of Swiss (or Japanese) movements, not even after a perfect service.
    1 point
  23. This is the intro, the book is 135 pages long and my scanner's very slow so it's going to take a bit longer than I thought... a Sunday job. KIF Spare Material Catalogue P1-17.pdf
    1 point
  24. Apart from the grease/heavy oil aspect, silicone grease is very difficult to remove once applied. If it migrates to other parts there could be problems in store. I worked in the lubes industry and we avoided silicone whenever we could as we could not make other lubes on the same plant until it had been mechanically cleaned! There are oils (not watch types) that contain silicone but these are normally for larger mechanisms. HP1300 would be my choice, but if grease then 9501 as this is quite a soft/oily grease (silicone grease tends to be stiffer). Just my thoughts.
    1 point
  25. I wouldn't follow the Seiko guide too closely. There's the obviously questionable suggestion that you oil the pallet pivots, and there's the use of "S-6" in parts of the train. That's a grease, and I know of no other manufacturer that call for the use of grease in any part of the train in any caliber this size. I would improvise and use HP1300 there like any other automatic device. I would however use some grease on pawl and ratchet teeth on the second reduction wheel. I can see that wearing down over time without a heavier lubricant.
    1 point
  26. I've run about 10 watches through my Janta/Pearl machine and during the 1st cleaning cycle on the last watch the unit stopped and won't turn on again. I've left a message with the seller but haven't heard back after 5 days. I was also having another issue where the arm the basket is attached to kept wanting to not stay in a fixed position. So as it was in the "spinning" mode when spinning off the cleaning/rinsing solution, the arm would quickly just shoot to the top of the unit, spraying the fluid everywhere. I ended up having to stand next to the machine and hold the arm in place during the spinning cycles, which was extremely annoying. So now I have a $600 door stop
    0 points
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