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Jewelless pin pallet oiling

spectre6000
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spectre6000 Distinguished Member

spectre6000

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I attempted a service on a cheap-o unjeweled full plate pin pallet movement last night (Westclox for what it's worth). I oiled it as if it were any other fully jeweled Swiss watch. I'm pretty sure watches like this have a different service methodology, but wanted to see what would happen and get some practice under my belt.

What happened is everything seems pretty happy save a very low amplitude. I let it run overnight, but it stopped at some point and still had wind enough to go again with a flick of the wrist. The mainspring isn't great (though I'm not going to invest in a new one for this watch), but I'm sure lubrication strategies better than what I used could be part of the solution. How does one approach these?

Most of the pivots have pretty standard holes with a reasonable oil reservoir. The balance staff sits in conical voids that don't actually go through. 

Edited by spectre6000
Nucejoe Distinguished Member

Nucejoe

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The cup or conical voil and bottom pivot wear out on these and need polishing.

Try more end shake on staff than your intuition tells. 

Escape teeth wears out faster with pin pallet. To make sure the issue is not the wear on pin pallet and escape teeth( since it is metal on metal) , apply a bit of naphta on the pins, if it took off running, try thinner oil.

spectre6000 Distinguished Member

spectre6000

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I ran the whole thing deconstructed through the ultrasonic cleaner with L&R fine watch cleaner and #3 rinse X2.

I used 9010, 9104, and 9415 per their typical applications.

It's a cheap cheap cheap movement, and if the state of the case is any indication, it's lived a HARD life. It's entirely possible it's completely knackered. 

EDIT for post while I was typing the above:

Good call. I didn't look back at the chart. I figured pin pallets would be treated differently, and that's probably where I got that notion. I'll clean off the 9415 from the pallet and try again with 9010. That's a significantly different viscosity in a very low torque location with a lot of friction. May be the ticket.

Edited by spectre6000
spectre6000 Distinguished Member

spectre6000

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That seems to have been the ticket insofar as there was a ticket. It's thoroughly knackered, as stated, and I'm not the first person to have been mucking around in there. The 9010 on the escape wheel teeth was good enough to get it running, probably as good as it's going to get for amplitude, but the amplitude was still pretty low. The main spring is an old school one, and seems to have retained quite a bit of memory, so that's probably a major contributor as well. The time grapher screen was just a random collection of blue and yellow dots, and trying to watch closely to figure out which was tick and which was tock and in what direction they were going was futile. The time grapher didn't seem all that sure what beat rate to auto detect, and I'm not going to worry about trying to find what the specs are on this movement. The final straw was when I tried to move the regulator arm to see if I could get the scatter plot to clear up a little to make some sense of it, and the beat rate autodetect started up again, and landed on 25200 (or something like that). I looked down and saw that the regulator pins pulled the hair spring rather than slid on it, and bent the hair spring. I noticed before I started that the hair spring wasn't the happiest, and that and past efforts at rectification seem to have been the cause. Insofar as I was likely to be successful, I think getting it running is success. Obviously doesn't keep time, but never did and never will in my possession. Not really worth the effort to make it do so.

oldhippy Distinguished Member

oldhippy

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When it comes to oiling. It is better to oil a few of the escape wheel teeth then the pallet pins, this way the oil will be distributed to the pins and it won't just run down the pins and sit at the bottom of the pallets.  

spectre6000 Distinguished Member

spectre6000

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That's what I did with both the 9415 and 9010. That's not to say I didn't initially attempt to oil the pins, but my mechanical sensibilities prevented that effort from getting very far.

Next time I find a few minutes, I'll either put it back in its case and away, or I'll pull it back apart and see if there's anything I can do to make the hairspring a bit happier. I think I'm about ready to tackle a watch that I actually believe might be salvageable...

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