Vostok 2209 with a Breguet overcoil

[HectorLooi]

This is my latest purchase from eBay. It is supposed to be running well and keeping good time. The case was almost perfect and the dial only had a small blemish.

When I put it on my timegrapher, it couldn't even get a reading. The first thing I saw when I opened up the watch was dirt everywhere. It was on the plates, the teeth of the wheels and pinions, the keyless.... literally everywhere.

Then I saw the hairspring. At first I thought it was distorted but when I took a closer look, I was shocked and thrilled to realize that it was an overcoil hairspring. I'd been looking for a watch with an overcoil hairspring for some time but most of the known brands are unaffordable ( at least not for tinkering with ).

But alas, joy turned to disappointment when I noticed that the overcoil was sagging and touching the 2nd loop of the hairspring. 

I took off the hairspring and managed to lift the overcoil off the 2nd coil. I also reshaped the endcurve and centred the collet. Everything seemed to be going well... until I broke the mainspring. 

It was one of those dreaded Russian "t" shaped endpiece mainsprings. I've done other Russian watches with these kind of mainsprings before but this one was particularly stubborn. I never had any success using a winder with this type of endpiece. Even when I got the "t" into the slot, it would alway jump out whenever I pressed the spring in.

I was winding the spring in by hand and was quite pleased with myself for getting the "t" into the slot. But as I came to the end, I noticed that the hole end had broken off.

Now my question is... should I get a new mainspring from Cousins or salvage one from a donor?

Also, what is the best way to get a Russian mainspring into the barrel?

Sorry for the long post. TIA.

[Malocchio]

Decided to hijack thread and share this pic. It's from a Vostok 2209 that I had serviced before. It didn't run super nice in the first place probably because of a not so perfect hairspring so I decided to open it again. Well there was some brass dust/shavings stuck in oil in the jewels and I was really clueless about the reason. It turned out to be this thing that a winding gear goes on to. What's that called anyway? A part that sticks out of the mainplate. Anyway, it had mushroomed quite badly. I remember the gear was very loose when I first serviced the movement but I didn't take a close look. Now I see where all that brass comes from  There's nothing I can do for this watch but it was pretty trashed already so it became a donor. The quality of the pic isn't too nice but you get the point. 

[Marc]

It happens.

This is a shot of the crown wheel post on the barrel bridge of an ETA 2783 that I recently serviced. Arrow A shows the outline of the original extent of the post, B is where the crown wheel has ground it back to. You can see the thin sliver of over-hang that the crown wheel has under-cut as a result of lots of hand winding and no lubrication.

Thankfully a new barrel bridge was easily had from Cousins and although the wrong colour the customer was very happy.

 

[Malocchio]

Oh lord that looks horrible. I guess it didn't run too good either.