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Showing content with the highest reputation on 01/11/23 in all areas

  1. I'm pretty stoked! I finally gathered all the parts I needed to case up an import ST36 movement I purchased for purposes of learning how to service. Here's a quick photo of what I've got: (protective plastic still attached to crystals) For whatever reason, I really like the 9:00 small seconds location. I just had elbow surgery so I had to mostly put this together with one hand and one baseball bat stub. But I was still able to cobble it together. It is of course not a finished product and I haven't serviced it yet either (I suspect it's about bone dry for one thing). So I call this phase one I guess. I kinda like how it looks for a $75 watch. Purchased crown isn't shown but the stem needs clipped anyway so no sense messing with that yet. I don't think I'm gonna try servicing this thing until I add a second arm back into my life. But the one-handed thing was an interesting and honestly a relaxing procedure for practicing patience and caution, which doesn't hurt at my skill level. So first big toe in the water of touching an actual watch. Am I on a decent track here?
    5 points
  2. Based on all the steps you have described, you can rest easy in the knowledge that your work space should be posing no more radiation risk than the natural background exposure that was there before you brought in any watches. I can verify my radiation meter function by taking a reading from the surface of our granite countertop in the kitchen, because that natural stone will register 20-30 counts per minute anytime I want to check, which is much higher than a reading taken from my repair bench after I've spent some time working with known "hot" watches in a cautious manner.
    3 points
  3. I have not seen any Chinese tool with stainless claws yet. I think brass is a good material. The vintage ones all used brass and have survived decades of use. I had a Chinese one made of aluminium and the gripping was ok. The problem was when encountering a difficult crystal, the pressure exerted on the claws by the rim of the body of the tool actually makes dents into the claws. Now, with notches on the claws, the force needed to get out of the depressions is so great that something eventually breaks. Then I got an Indian made one with brass claws. It worked great for a while until the aluminum hub which held the claws deform from repeated use. So, IMO, a vintage Vigor is anytime better than modern c..p.
    3 points
  4. Got this watch off eBay for 25$, would run for a few seconds then stop. Once I had fully disassembled it, I inspected all of the pivots, trainwheels, jewels etc to look for signs of damage. Found none so assumed it just needed to be cleaned. I cleaned the watch parts in an ultrasonic cleaner doing one cycle with a detergent, a second with a solvent, and a third in 99.9 % alcohol. put it back together and lubricated and its running great, Seems like it just needed to be cleaned and lubricated in order to run well again.
    2 points
  5. I have calmed down a bit since making that rather antsy post. I understand all of what you guys are saying, and I'm sorry if my ramblings made it seem like I wasn't taking any of what you guys are saying. I just have little spurs like that. I guess recently it's been worse. After hearing what @LittleWatchShop, @JohnFrumand @MarcusDsaid I feel a bit better. The main reason I was so terribly scared was because of the radon decay and the fact that I watchmaking from my desk in my bedroom. (I clean the watches in a better, more ventilated room by the way.) I think I am finally understanding this all. and after a short break I will continue learning to watchmake with all of this in mind. We can only learn Hoping this thread is seen by others whom may have had the same thoughts as me.
    2 points
  6. This damage was made deliberately most times to fit a wrong stem Repair as nickelsilver said.
    2 points
  7. I believe I already mentioned the problem if you look at an original wall from the spring the end is a little different than a normal everything else in the universe. Somewhere in the group I have pictures of all of this. So basically the Waltham end has to have a tapered part filed so it wedges itself into the protruding part of the steel barrel and it has to have a little bend otherwise as you found it will never catch by itself and even if it does it will not stay in place sometimes without the tapering. So yes the problem with the modern Springs are just stamped and the original ones had some machining. I have a second Waltham mainspring on order hopefully will come in some time for a comeback watch where the hole size was too small so I had the hole size expanded. The benefits of where I work is they have a very expensive fiber laser and it works really nice for cutting holes square holes. But the boss likes to show off and the square hole broke and now that met my end of the spring stuck up into the other part shaved off metal and the whole watch came to a stop as a comeback. Yes I can understand the redundant part about hating Waltham's oh the other thing you want to do is check your lift angle I don't have my pocket watch lift angle charge in front of me. But they can vary in that may be one of the reasons you have an amplitude issue in addition to of course the pivots being bad because they do go back with time and need to be polished.
    1 point
  8. Great job Vinito. Lots of learning to be had here. Would definitely recommend to do a full service once you are all healed up. The size of the movement makes it very nice to work/learn on.
    1 point
  9. It is back together with a new MS and a replacement screw which I made. Amplitude went way up but it is still running slow. Beat error virtually zero. I will let it run awhile and see what happens. I made some adjustment of the timing screws and got it running faster. Will continue to look for issues that I may have missed.
    1 point
  10. Perhaps the delivery from Holland is all legit or for the present time a loophole in the EU extortion machinery Perhaps they (the Chinese) have some method to get the stuff into Holland and then deliver from there to make it look legit. It's been pretty fast too, three to four weeks.
    1 point
  11. Welcome to the WRT forum. Some points to take into account when buying watches to repair, Do you plan to wear or re sell the pieces? There is always the questions of spare parts avaiability , price and shipping..... costs. Good idea to get a spare or scrap movement to scavenge parts from.
    1 point
  12. Perhaps I can ask AliExpress and make sure, else there is a chance that I've to pay the PostNord extortion.
    1 point
  13. Shopping on AliExpress my two most recent purchases were delivered from Holland without any additional charges
    1 point
  14. My item was shipped to Germany without additional tax or shipping costs. If you are looking for a seller inside the EU you should search ebay
    1 point
  15. Good idea Nucejoe, it’s a well simple ,well engineered movement and the quality first class all the way.Suprised me when I first opened it ,belied the simplicity of the exterior presentation on the dial. im going to try to improve things on the balance regulator with simple measures and take it from there. Everything is a work in progress in our hobby, no? tonyg
    1 point
  16. The regulator arm can be moved just by pushing it. Then, when it's close (when the rate is close) you can fine tune its position by turning the screw on top of the balance cock that engages it. But it can be moved independently of that screw.
    1 point
  17. I think technically it's supposed to float above the main plate but I would agree typically you'll see wear it has touched. Then exactly what you're doing I will put grease anyplace I see that parts are wearing. I also like to check any of the steel components like ratchet wheels to make sure that there is no burrs on the edges of the teeth because sometimes that happens and that's why you'll see the wearing. Usually they put bushings bushings in as it's hard to get a jewel of the correct size to fit.
    1 point
  18. Well, I was one of the designers--it was my company. See patent: US7505540. There is no PLL involved in this invention
    1 point
  19. Hi, no, I don't lume dials. Just repair missing parts if needed. Frank
    1 point
  20. The nice thing about luming hands is that it's easy to practice and perform tests and trial runs because random spare hands are either sitting in our parts bins or cheap to acquire. I can't say how they will look in 30 years, but I've had good luck simply using "brushing lacquer" from the hardware store as the base, and suspending a lume powder in that to get to the 80/20% settled ratio that is shown on Dr. Ranfft's website in the archived "Luminous Paste" reference section. Powdered chalk has been discussed in this forum previously in a thread entitled "Color Matching Old Lume." Whatever powder is used should be of a uniform, fine consistency. Frank - did you do the numerals on that dial? I like the look of fully-lumed arabic numerals on a black dial, but have wondered how difficult it is to get reasonable results by hand-painting.
    1 point
  21. Yes, as Clockboy said they are for working with rubbed in jewels. These are for opening the lip of the setting after pushing out the old jewel, there should be a corresponding set with concave faces on the tips for pushing the lip back closed after fitting the new jewel. Most sets have both types in the box, or are double-ended with both types of tip.
    1 point
  22. Laptop? Ought to be able to use a Linux tablet too, like this https://www.pine64.org/pinetab/ The keyboard is removable. Tg gives you a lot more than just a scope, no need to switch between timegrapher and scope. Use less space than the weishi alone with a better screen. I wonder how the timing accuracy is on the CM108? All the software I've seen uses the audio sample rate as the reference time. They allow calibration, and tg might even get continuous calibration with NTP, but still if the audio sample rate is not constant, this shows up as errors in the s/d. The cm108 requires a 12 MHz clock crystal, so I assume it generates its own audio and USB clock. USB spec is ±0.25% on the clock. Something you see now is crystal-less designs with just an on-chip RC oscillator, which is not good enough to meet 0.25%, but they use the USB SOF signal from the USB host to synchronize a PLL. I've read C8051F32x does this, but who knows anything about that chip? The sparse CM108 datasheet also says it uses adaptive mode. This relates to how USB audio rate is controlled and so it important for timing accuracy. What this means is it will attempt to modify the audio clock rate to match rate at which the USB host consumes data. But, how does it do this? One way is have an audio buffer with a fill level that is measured. If it starts to fill up, audio is being produced too fast and the audio clock is slowed down. This clock could be slowed down by having a fractional PLL with a few steps near the normal rate. It can slow down one step. But this might be too slow. So the buffer empties and now the rate must be increased. So you get an audio rate that shifts back and forth between different rates. An example might be 47619 Hz, 48000 Hz, and 48387 Hz. I got from an NXP app note. What's that mean in s/d? It's 685 s/d slow to 691 s/d fast. That would be pretty useless! One hopes the CM108 can steer the PLL in a closer tolerance than that! One could probably measure it on the ADLRCK pin, assume the external I2S interface runs on the same clock as the internal ADC, which is probably does.
    1 point
  23. It's normal to see some wear marks where the ratchet wheel contacts the bridge. As it is just floating there it does make contact- I put a little grease there but it's often dry. You'll need to get a good look at the barrel pivot hole in the bridge and plate, look from the inside with some backlight, the pivot usually doesn't make it all the way through, so it can look round and nice from the outside, but egg shaped from the inside.
    1 point
  24. You don't have to do without glowing. I use non-radiating lume (color: nature) and mix to required color with color powder from the artists shop. l use special laquer, but you can use e.g. clear model paint and mix with above. Frank
    1 point
  25. Here copper circuit stripboard and a soldering iron are used.
    1 point
  26. I've used colored chalk ground up very fine mixed with lacquer to replicate the old lume in some vintage Omegas (like Ranchero). It should be fairly easy on your hands with their thin slot- the big Ranchero hands are a pain finding the right consistency/mix of chalk to lacquer, taking into account contraction and thinning as it dries.
    1 point
  27. A stem with a longer pivot risks fouling the minute counter shaft, which passes through just a short distance away. It is possible to remove the remains of the tube and open up the hole and press fit a new tube, but it's very tricky work preferably done in a jig boring machine.
    1 point
  28. I don't know if you are aware of this, so just in case. In these kind of movements to unwind the MS down you first need to uninstall the second reduction wheel, it won't unwind with it installed.
    1 point
  29. It's just my home address. I deleted it, and all cookies but I get the same whatever I try. Very annoying I just downloaded the app to my phone - same problem !!! grrrr GOT IT ! When I registered with Ali Express, I let Google auto-fill the address. Seems it didn't like it. I deleted it, entered it all manually and it finally worked. Import tax to pay, but still only £27
    1 point
  30. This is the one I purchased. https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256802886227821.html?spm=a2g0o.order_list.order_list_main.5.19601802Ghdv9F&gatewayAdapt=glo2usa&_randl_shipto=US I'm pretty pleased with it. I have been out sick for a couple of days now, but I got a little energy to get to my bench when this thing arrived on my doorstep.
    1 point
  31. Glad yours worked well and that's what I'm hoping for too. I have one of those coming (via eBay instead) at the end of this month that I'm looking forward to receiving. This particular import seems to get pretty good reviews. The worst I've heard is that some of the pushers & anvils occasionally are loose or tight, which doesn't bother me as I will simply nudge them to fit better if necessary.
    1 point
  32. It's why other than if you are clockmaker they a lot of times will make their solutions because that's been published quite a bit. Typically in watch repair it's easier to just buy a solution. Then typically a lot of watchmakers have an aversion to water-based cleaners because we don't like rust. Cleaning is a interesting process it's not really cleaning and then rinsing the whole process is cleaning. This is where to start shortchanging on the rinse for instance you're not doing a proper cleaning job. I snipped out an image on what Omega currently recommends.
    1 point
  33. My version is not a 3D printed „prototype“ anymore but industrially injection moulded. The software Tg is well known and works perfectly: download page There are cell phone apps as well!
    1 point
  34. The Chinese microphones to be used with a timegrapher software or app get better and cheaper! Here is what I got today. I used the free tg timegrapher software (tg-timer 0.5.0)
    1 point
  35. Ok. I didn't get any answers here but i solved the problem or problems so if you get these readings maybe i can help. 1. The big positional variation was due to my hairspring not being centered in the regulator pins on my balance, they were rubbing against the inner pin even with the etachron regulator stud/pins set to all the way open. I opened it, adjusted the etachron stud so my hairspring was centered and then slowly closed it till there was the tiniest bit of movement in the hairspring. This corrected the positional variance in my rate. This was a new movement and it had this problem. 2. I noticed a weird look to the oil bubble under my top balance jewel. THe bubble i had before had now gaps in it and was no longer round. I removed the shock spring, reversed it because that helped once cleaned and relubed it to a perfect bubble and that drastically increased my rate in all positions but was still not good enough. 3. Then i remembered since i was going off a seiko service sheet and for some insane reason they do not tell you to lubricate the barrel arbor, OR the jewel it sits in! Insane! I went back and relubricated the barrel arbor with hp1300 and WOW, my amplitude in dial down jumped to 303 and in dial down 298 (briefly). Those things fixed all the issues. my amplitude is INSANE and my positional delta is fantastic now.
    1 point
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