Tmuir

Welcome Lucan from Western Australia. Get yourself some cheap watches to first practice on that won't upset you if you break them.

How old is the watch? It is possible that the oil in the watch is starting to gum up. One 'cheat' you can do on cheap quartz movements that arent worth the time to service is to hold them over a demagnatising machine and give the demagnatisor a short burst. The magnetic field will cause the rotor in the watch to rotate very quickly causing the hands to move very fast. If you are lucky this can be enough to free up the watch se it keeps working for a while longer, but don't do this on an expensive quartz watch. I'm guessing you don't have access to a quartz watch tester that can tell you if the electronics are alive.

I need to buy or make a mainspring winder to be able to insert the T end mainsprings into my Waltham aircraft clocks. The inside barrel diameter is around 19mm, so too big for my pocket watch mainspring winders. Doing a bit of Googling it appears the K&D No128 mainspring winder's largest 'cup' has an outside diameter of around 17mm. Can anyone confirm this as I think that should be close enough to work, although I would prefer it to be 17.5 to 18mm, but I'm pretty confident 17mm would do. I just don't want to buy a set if I've got the dimensions wrong. Or if anyone else has a recommendation for another mainspring winder I'm open to suggestions. The mainspring height are approx 5.3mm, so the winder needs to be able to fit a mainspring of that size. Waltham aircraft clocks are size 22s movements

I couldn't resist just opening up the case to give the movement a quick once over and its as I expected, despite been 'Serviced' if I ran the clock the way it is it wouldn't be long before some serious damage is done to it. The movement is reasonable clean, but a long way from perfect, can still see some large fluff on the balance and other wheels. The pivots look to of been oiled, but the pallets are dry as a bone, so wear would happen there pretty quickly if it was run. There is also a flat spot on the hairspring that causes the hairspring to not sit correctly between the regulator pins, the hairspring is half in, half out between the two pins, so I think when I get to that I will speak nicely to the master watchmaker at my school for help as I don't trust myself to fix that. Also note the broken screw in the top of the picture on the winding plate, that is going to be a pain to resolve. Although the clock does tick at the moment I suspect when I strip it down I will find more nasties inside. I also suspect that at some point the mains springs have been replaced with incorrect sized mainsprings. Look at the photo below, the blue band you can see below the teeth on the barrel is the mainspring. I've never come across a barrel that leaves the spring exposed like that so I am guessing a spring too high has been used, but I will confirm that when I actually strip the clock down. The other barrel is also like this as this is a double barrel clock.

Yes when I strip it down I will take photos and post them.

Yes worst case I will work out what thread it is and make my own screws. I have a large selection of taps and dies in metric, BSW, BSF, BA, BSB, but no SAE ones yet as I have nver had the need to make one before. On Sunday its Remembrance Day in Australia and I will be attending a ceremony by our local RSL to remember and commemorate 100 years since the end of the First World War.

Today I volunteered to attend my local watch associations stand at an antique fair which we do to promote the association and watch school. The one nice perk is as a stall holder we can trawl all other stalls before the hoards descend and this is the biggest antique fair where I live. Looking at the other stalls I came across a Waltham CDIA clock which is very unusual to find in Perth Western Australia, although the seller didn't let it go cheap I got it for a reasonable price. The seller told me he had serviced it, and although the clock runs it sounds like an old man walking with crutches so I will be servicing it again soon. I have yet to open it up, but I can see it is missing 2 of the 3 movement mounting screws to hold the movement to the case. Going by my book the part number is 2'679, not that I expect anyone has some NOS screws lying around, but if anyone has a couple of mounting screws from a parts movement they are happy to pass on please let me know. Anyhow enjoy the photo. These clocks were made from September 1941 to October 1944 and a total of 134,000 were made. It is a size 37, 8 day, 24 hour, 15 jewels movement, it is essentially Waltham's 37 size 8 day double barrel automobile clock form 1910 with some minor variations. I now own 4 WWII aircraft clocks and I'm betting in the future I will add to that number.

It might be a relatively simple longcase, but I like it. I would love to have something like that in the house, although the wife would kill me.

I would ever complain about someone overpacking an item they were posting to me. I've had plenty of underpacked items sent to me. The worst was a 1920s car clock that was sent in a post satchel with just one layer of bubble wrap. Needless to say it arrived with a cracked glass...

On a related topic what I am more concerned with are Russian sub clocks. Not the 'made for tourists' ones, but ones that have actually served time on a Russian sub, thankfully there are not that many of those about. See this news article for what I'm talking about. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3556824/Radioactive-clock-killed-Husband-s-gift-wife-Russian-sub-gave-deadly-rays.html But even this is not good to have in the kitchen, but it would take many years before it did any real harm

For vintage watches that the hands may have radium lume on them and they are not painted I just drop them into a small jar of acetone and let it dissolve the lume. I then remove the hands and tip the acetone (about 20mills only)into my jar of spent cleaning fluid which is left in the corner of my shed to evaporate down and then the heavier parts like turps that dont evaporate are stored in a container to go to my local council recycler that takes oil and paint thinners. The little amount of radium in it is of no risk as I don't touch that many old watches and it means I don't have to worry about dust coming up from the hands when I remove the old lume. I do take care even with the movement and case and ensure I wash my hands after dismantling them for cleaning and usually wear finger cots too.

Start by buying yourself some cheap movements off ebay you wont get upset if you trash them, and you will trash the first few movements you work on. You are correct it will be more expensive buying parts to build the customised watch you want, maybe save that until you have had some practice on cheaper movements.

Yes certainly beats paying $100 plus USD and postage. I generally prefer original copies, but I won't pay over the odds just to get an original copy.

No worries, I've been trying to get a copy of this book for about a year. As soon as I found out it had been reprinted I ordered myself a copy and have been waiting to confirm it was a good quality copy before letting everyone one else know.

If theye were both selling for the same price I would get the bottom one. If the top one was half the price then you would need to consider if you would use the extra accessories the bottom one has.