New member with some questions

[Parrot]

Hi everyone,

My name is Timothy, and I'm from The Netherlands. I've been interested in watchmaking and repairing for a long time now. I have been following the courses for a few years,

 and have always been interested in doing them, but never had enough time to dedicate a lot of time into following them. The time has come however, I do have some more spare time now.  I'm still reading on the forum here and haven't started any of the courses yet. 

I  do have a few questions though which I hopefully can ask here. Does anyone know what tools you'll need in course 1 & 2? What kind of budget would be needed to buy the tools? And in regards of a watch, does it need to be brand new or could you also practice with older watches? 

Thank you, 

Parrot. 

[grsnovi]

Hi Timothy 

Mark's level 2 course will allow you to work along with him by purchasing an inexpensive movement for about $35. The benefit of using the same movement of course is that in the event that you get "lost" or "confused" you can back up the video and try again.

As far as tools go, you can go crazy but Mark has a list of suggestions here.

Usually, the big stumbling block is oil. Mark also has some suggestions here.

Minimally you'll need two or three good screwdrivers, a good set of tweezers and some optical enhancement. Depending on how serious you think you may be you may be able to get by initially with 3 basic oils.

Watching some YouTube videos will give you examples of what is used by "the pros" - or at least by those who take the time to post their work on YT.

Also, depending where you are, Mark has a list of vendors (here are some in the USA go up a level to see vendor in other countries) where you can get "the good stuff" (of course Amazon has most of it too, just realize that you usually get what you pay for - a $10 set of 10 screwdrivers won't be equivalent to a $110 set of 9 screwdrivers).

Edited May 23, 2022 by grsnovi

[Nucejoe]

Hi Timothy,

Welcome to WRT forum and good luck with your forey into horology.

You don,t really need expensive oils to learn watch repair, any cheap watch oil would do neither does the movement have to be new, in fact I recommend starting with a scrap movement, better yet to  get your hands on two movements of the same caliber and  build a runner out of the two, needless to say you will have extra parts left over and can do without buying spare parts. 

Some newbies here even show us what they have found and ask for advice which ones to buy.

Regs

[Michael1962]

Welcome to the forum Timothy.