Elgin 347 stops after a few hours

[Crockpot]

Hello everyone I’ve just serviced this Elgin 347 and it was running good before except for low amplitude and it was very dirty. So I thourghly cleaned and oiled it with the right moebius oils and put new mainspring. It looks good on timegrapher amplitude 260-297 face up/face down. 240crown up. but now it stops after I leave it alone for awhile. I just picked it up and was stopped I pulled the crown out to time setting mode and turned it to set the time and it started running again. I just fully wound it a few hours ago and it’s still at almost full wind but it just stops.It’s my nicest pocket watch so please help me figure this out. Thanks

Edited July 16, 2022 by Crockpot

[JohnR725]

always nice to show us pictures of the timing machine so we can just look at them maybe we'll see something you don't see. Then I assume it time the watch was fully wound up when it stops you started again when another timing cycling give us pictures of those. Otherwise fully wound up -15 minutes could you need the watch to run a little bit the settle down then when it stops timing again pictures of dial up dial down and maybe crown down at the minimum

then troubleshooting the watch in the case is a little harder. Because it adds things like the hands are the hands hitting maybe that's why it's stopping. We can't see the dial side components of the dial lets an issue. But you can take the back off look at and see if anything looks obviously wrong and then give the balance wheel just a tiny push to see if it takes often runs.

[Waggy]

I had a similar situation, I looked over the watch and stripped it down, cleaned and re-built several times and always the watch would work great and then stop at around 1 minute. I had a flash of inspiration and marked the center seconds wheel with a shrpe  and noticed that it would stop in exactly the same place EVERY time. Then I knew it had to be a problem with this component, as any other wheel would make the seconds wheel stop at some other position each time. I took the movement apart (again!) and took out the seconds wheel and it looked OK, but then I decided to look again and I found that one of the leaves on the underside had (what looked like) a bite taken out of it. All of the other teeth on the wheel were in good shape and every other leave was in perfect shape. Fortunately I had a donor movement and switched out the wheel and the watch ran without this error.

Sorry for the long winded story, but the lesson I took away was that if an error is repeatable... every 60 seconds in my case, then you can bet a wheel tooth/leave (on the train of wheels) is to blame. If the error is random, then you are looking at pivots/jewels etc.. So time how long it takes to stop and if it is repeatable then you have narrowed it down.

[JohnR725]

4 hours ago, Waggy said:

but the lesson I took away was that if an error is repeatable... every 60 seconds in my case, then you can bet a wheel tooth/leave (on the train of wheels) is to blame. If the error is random, then you are looking at pivots/jewels etc.. So time how long it takes to stop and if it is repeatable then you have narrowed it down

the fun thing is finding repeatable patterns. This is where timing machines sometimes can help providing you have the right timing machine. Some software some expensive machines have the time plot capability where it makes it really easy to see repeating patterns. Or in the days of paper tape which is not quite as easy to do on LCD screen?

For instance at the PDF at the link below A timing machine manual written when they understood how to write a manual and they assume that the beginner knew nothing and everything is nicely explained. For instance Starting on page 15 other PDF something about repeating patterns. The problem with an LCD screen is that unlike the paper tape that can go on well basically forever the LCD screen folds over and it's hard to see patterns other than you can see that it might be going up or down. Or you look at the numeric display you'll see her amplitude going up and down so unless you are careful on timing the rate of up-and-down it's a little hard to see patterns. This is where the exotic expensive timing machines are some of the software with time plot capabilities become interesting as they will often strode repeating patterns.

 

 

http://www.historictimekeepers.com/documents/Micromat.pdf