Omega Timing Baffler

[Woolshire]

It’s an Omega R13.5 (same as 240); a ladies watch movement from 40’s.

it was in parts in a drawer for years. I serviced it and reassembled it. Everything looks good. Only problem? It gains 10 minutes per hour!

The usual suspects, it isn’t. Hairspring is flat and concentric and breathes well (just realllllllly fast). It also isn’t hitting anywhere. Not magnetized. The timegrapher shows 230 deg amplitude (reasonable for old watch with old mainspring…didn’t have new one in my stash). Beat error is decent at around 1.8 ms. The timegrapher also correctly identifies it as a 19,600 bph movement.

However, the movement is running so fast that the machine just shows a bunch of + signs instead of a timing accuracy. I haven’t cased the movement but approximated the time gain by watching the spokes on the 4th wheel. Takes about 50 seconds for the wheel to make one revolution.

Looking for ideas. I have gotten reasonably good at troubleshooting most issues but this one has me baffled. 

[JohnR725]

1 hour ago, Woolshire said:

The timegrapher also correctly identifies it as a 19,600 bph movement.

Your timing machine knows something that the two links down below don't know and Omega doesn't know?

The links below say 21,600 it's possible they're wrong but what about Omega are they wrong? I snipped out an image out of their timing specifications sheet and they all seem to think that it's 21,600? Why don't you try changing your machine manually to 21,600 and see what it looks like?

http://www.ranfft.de/cgi-bin/bidfun-db.cgi?10&ranfft&0&2uswk&Omega_R13_5

http://www.ranfft.de/cgi-bin/bidfun-db.cgi?10&ranfft&0&2uswk&Omega_240

 

 

[Woolshire]

Thank you, John. Are are correct. 21,600 is the bph rate. The timegrapher is correctly identifying that. Here is a photo of what it’s doing. I did place the minute hand on the cannon pinion and watched it for an hour and it “only” gained 92 seconds. 

[Woolshire]

A couple additional thoughts:

1. I made sure there were no balance screws missing from the balance. If there were, that would explain the unacceptable fast rate.

2. I may start counting pinion leaves and teeth on wheels. I‘ll need to think through the 21,600 bph set-up and how that relates to the proper number of leaves and teeth on the wheels. This watch doesn’t have a sub-seconds, so it may be that the 4th wheel will turn more than one turn per minute. Does that make sense? 

As I said, this watch was in parts and I have never assembled it. I wonder if it has a wrong replacement part? A wheel or maybe hairspring? I do know the balance has the serial number scribed on the underside of the arms.

I find this part of watchmaking very interesting and enjoy being able to resolve an issue like this. This watch movement isn’t rare but it’s case is a nice 18k Omega. I don’t see many of those…most have been melted, unfortunately.

[JohnR725]

16 hours ago, Woolshire said:

I did place the minute hand on the cannon pinion and watched it for an hour and it “only” gained 92 seconds. 

This is unacceptably fast and also conflicts with your timing machine?

1 hour ago, Woolshire said:

As I said, this watch was in parts and I have never assembled it. I wonder if it has a wrong replacement part? A wheel or maybe hairspring? I do know the balance has the serial number scribed on the underside of the arms.

You want to elaborate why it was in parts? In other words where did it come from in parts?

Something amusing in watch repair professionals versus hobbyists? Oftentimes professionals will look at watches as a source of components and they will get  cannibalized. Hobbyists will look at the components is something to assemble. Which is fine providing?

The problem becomes if it's a mix-and-match situation where several watches perhaps were disassembled and we have lots of separate components as opposed to this is one watch only?

Then for Omega hand Rolex probably others but those of the most common ones I'm familiar with. You can end up with a base caliber that runs at one frequency. Then you can have other calibers based on the base caliber that could run at different frequencies. Usually there is a component change or a couple wheels that get changed and of course the balance wheel and hairspring would have to be matched to run at the right frequency.

Typically in these situations the balance wheel oscillate at a frequency bike 21,600 it will look wonderful on the timing machine and hands will revolve at a peculiar rate if it's the wrong gear ratio for the frequency of the balance wheel.

On the other hand the situation that you have is a timing machine thinks the watches running slow at least the graphical display. The numerical display knows there's a problem and is refusing to give you numbers that's bad? Any time using the timing machine the graphical display and the numbers have to somewhat agree otherwise you have a problem. Ideally like for amplitude what you're seeing in the watch has to agree with the timing machine. Sometimes you can have weird amplitudes usually way too low and the machine picks up the wrong waveform and gives you really happy numbers.

So where am I going with all of this? Your balance wheel is an oscillating at the correct frequency in other words its out of the frequency range caused by a variety of problems?

I'm attaching the parts list no notice something you typically don't see on Swiss watches except older ones? Typically on American pocket watches they hairspring is were available separately. This is because typically American pocket watches they have an over coil over coil hairsprings are usually premade two very exacting specifications then matched the balance wheel. Exactly what we see with your watch part number 1320 that's the hairspring is available separately. In the balance wheel of course was available separate and then the balance wheel assembled and finally the balance wheel with the hairspring etc.

what were not seeing here is? This is probably the base caliber for other Omega watches so if you take the hairspring off of one of those other watches and put it on this watch you're going to have exactly what you have a timing issue.

If it came as pieces and you had more pieces than watch in other words two or three watches were disassembled then you can have problems like this you probably don't have the right hairspring for this balance wheel. Then who knows if the gear ratios right but until you can get a valid timing on the timing machine you can't really deal with the gear ratio.

 

1475_Omega 240.pdf

[Knebo]

On 3/26/2022 at 11:52 PM, JohnR725 said:

 

Hello! 

This sheet is super interesting, but what its source? 

I'm surprised to see the lift angle at 52° for all of these calibres. The lift angles list from watchguy.co.uk specifies varying lift angles for the 240 to 244 calibres. See screenshot below. 

[JohnR725]

7 hours ago, Knebo said:

This sheet is super interesting, but what its source? 

it's interesting with watch companies are is often times they have supplemental documentation that's not readily available or even this existence is not even known about. For instance on the cousins website if you do a search for working like at the link below you'll see it in a sampling of Omega working instructions. If you look at any of those open him up and look at the PDF you'll notice on every single page is watermarked with who downloaded it and when and their address. Makes you wonder how paranoid Swatch group is over the documentation. Which explains why a lot of documentation never sees the light of day is no one's going to risk their Swatch source of documentation.

So where was the source of the information I had Omega. You're looking for working instruction number 28 not to be found on the cousins website.

8 hours ago, Knebo said:

I'm surprised to see the lift angle at 52° for all of these calibres. The lift angles list from watchguy.co.uk specifies varying lift angles for the 240 to 244 calibres

just to see if there was a change I looked up the newest one that I have which is 2020 and they still show 52° for the 24X calibers.

 

 

https://www.cousinsuk.com/document/search?SearchString=working

 

 

[tomh207]

10 hours ago, Knebo said:

Hello! 

This sheet is super interesting, but what its source? 

I'm surprised to see the lift angle at 52° for all of these calibres. The lift angles list from watchguy.co.uk specifies varying lift angles for the 240 to 244 calibres. See screenshot below. 

Looking at this table the lift angles are incremented by 1 on each line,  I suspect that this data was collated using a spreadsheet and who ever was entering the data dragged down from the first lift angle to the last. Default operation in situation is to increment by 1, not copy the digits down.

 

Tom

[JohnR725]

1 hour ago, tomh207 said:

Looking at this table the lift angles are incremented by 1 on each line,  I suspect that this data was collated using a spreadsheet and who ever was entering the data dragged down from the first lift angle to the last. Default operation in situation is to increment by 1, not copy the digits down.

interesting observation. The lift angles can be found at the link below and sure enough the Omega section starting at 240 going up to 250 does increment by one. Which is a interesting observation maybe my Omega specifications are wrong but we should tell Omega they made a mistake because they're listing them all as 52°. Then I don't seem to have a 250 on the Omega document?

I suspect the 250 on the chart at the link below is wrong it doesn't exist. The reason is they cents 58° in doing a search of the Omega document there's only one watch with 58° and that's not the right number. 2600A + B 21600 58° that's the only watch they have with 58°.

I wonder if anyone ever complains that maybe the numbers are wrong? One of the likely was copied off one of the other lists most of the lift angle lists all look the same because they all came basically from the exact same source.

https://watchguy.co.uk/cgi-bin/lift_angles?&redir_count=1

 

[Knebo]

Thanks for the feedback!

I did a visual review of the amplitude to calibrate the timegrapher and I think I can confirm with a high level of confidence that the true lift angle is 52° for cal 244.

I also note that the power reserve is noted as 30h in the Omega sheet and 48h at Ranfft. I get 34h (with a brand new, original/NOS mainspring) and conclude that the Omega sheet is correct as a minimum spec. 

Lastly, one question @JohnR725 : the amplitude at 24h -- which position is this? Or the average? Or the lowest (of the 3 tested ones)? 

 

On 5/6/2023 at 8:43 PM, JohnR725 said:

it's interesting with watch companies are is often times they have supplemental documentation that's not readily available or even this existence is not even known about. For instance on the cousins website if you do a search for working like at the link below you'll see it in a sampling of Omega working instructions. If you look at any of those open him up and look at the PDF you'll notice on every single page is watermarked with who downloaded it and when and their address. Makes you wonder how paranoid Swatch group is over the documentation. Which explains why a lot of documentation never sees the light of day is no one's going to risk their Swatch source of documentation.

So where was the source of the information I had Omega. You're looking for working instruction number 28 not to be found on the cousins website.

just to see if there was a change I looked up the newest one that I have which is 2020 and they still show 52° for the 24X calibers.

 

 

https://www.cousinsuk.com/document/search?SearchString=working

 

 

I'd love to have that document but for now I'm grateful to you for sharing the screenshot that is currently relevant for me

 

On 5/6/2023 at 11:25 PM, tomh207 said:

Looking at this table the lift angles are incremented by 1 on each line,  I suspect that this data was collated using a spreadsheet and who ever was entering the data dragged down from the first lift angle to the last. Default operation in situation is to increment by 1, not copy the digits down.

 

Tom

hahaha, I thought the same! And indeed, as stated above, this was probably the case.

On 5/7/2023 at 1:05 AM, JohnR725 said:

interesting observation. The lift angles can be found at the link below and sure enough the Omega section starting at 240 going up to 250 does increment by one. Which is a interesting observation maybe my Omega specifications are wrong but we should tell Omega they made a mistake because they're listing them all as 52°. Then I don't seem to have a 250 on the Omega document?

I suspect the 250 on the chart at the link below is wrong it doesn't exist. The reason is they cents 58° in doing a search of the Omega document there's only one watch with 58° and that's not the right number. 2600A + B 21600 58° that's the only watch they have with 58°.

I wonder if anyone ever complains that maybe the numbers are wrong? One of the likely was copied off one of the other lists most of the lift angle lists all look the same because they all came basically from the exact same source.

https://watchguy.co.uk/cgi-bin/lift_angles?&redir_count=1

 

So yea, it seems that the lost on WatchGuy isn't perfect. We should point it out to the "guy"!

[SimonJ]

Does the rate change in different positions?  

IE: Is it only running very fast dial up?

[JohnR725]

7 hours ago, Knebo said:

Lastly, one question @JohnR725 : the amplitude at 24h -- which position is this? Or the average? Or the lowest (of the 3 tested ones)? 

I have more images out of the PDF. That would explain what you're asking for

7 hours ago, Knebo said:

So yea, it seems that the lost on WatchGuy isn't perfect. We should point it out to the "guy"!

 

by the way he isn't the first to come up with a list others have done up before him. But I'm guessing because he lists every single caliber is a separate in the lists sometimes consolidate them probably what a split them apart is when the problem occurred. Which means it must be more like this you should build go through the list and  look for numbers that are slightly increasing

 

 

 

Watch Brand, Caliber, Size, VPH and Lift Angle.pdf

[Knebo]

1 hour ago, JohnR725 said:

I have more images out of the PDF. That would explain what you're asking for

 

by the way he isn't the first to come up with a list others have done up before him. But I'm guessing because he lists every single caliber is a separate in the lists sometimes consolidate them probably what a split them apart is when the problem occurred. Which means it must be more like this you should build go through the list and  look for numbers that are slightly increasing

 

 

 

Watch Brand, Caliber, Size, VPH and Lift Angle.pdf 3.16 MB · 0 downloads

Perfect. Thank you!