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Key-wound pocket-watch; where, when, what & how ?


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Hello All;

Bought this silver-cased running 15-jewels, Breguet hairspring, key-wound pocket-watch since it looked good, seemingly in reasonable condition and it offered opportunities, among others, to polish & blue hands and screw-heads.

In short, it seemed a real nice restoration endeavor. It's also my first key-wound pocket watch.

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There were a few things which I haven't encountered before and I like to ask your opinion / input;

1) To start with the glass crystal; Initially it looked liked that somebody had crudely attempted to remove scratches in the center of the glass, not dead-center, but slightly off-center. However, JohnR725 pointed out that this could be the original crystal and they were made like this (?). It was a bit hard to capture on camera, but you can see the flat spot pointed at by the arrow;

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2) The next thing I stumbled over was the pallet-fork. When still mounted and when looking from above, it looked like it was made out of one-piece of steel, with no pallet-jewels. However, when disassembling the watch, the pallet fork turned out to be more than just a "standard" fork.

The horns of the fork seem to be hand-made and the tail (when assembled it sits around the escape-wheel pinion) seems to provide the banking, as there seems to be no banking pins on the main-plate or anywhere else.

Before disassembling, I had the watch on the timegrapher and trying to match the visual amplitude with the timegrapher readings, the lift-angle had to be set to a whopping ≈59 degrees ! (?)

Top-view;

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Bottom-view;

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Here is the main-plate. No banking-pins. The two screws are for the pallet fork bridge, which has no banking either.

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There are jewels in the pallet, but the slots for the jewels are cut horizontally, instead of vertically;

Side-view;

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No idea out of which material these jewels are made of !?

 

3) The main-barrel is "floating". I took the key-guard off, but don't see how to dismantle it any further and how to get the main-spring out.

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4) As for further clues and numbers, these numbers were on the main-plate, hidden underneath the porcelain dial;

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The markings inside the back-lid of the housing. The movement has (serial?) number 7106 and the case seems to be "re-numbered".

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and the inscription on inner-lid;

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The Breguet hairspring has also an interesting bend from the outer-coil inwards (note the temperature compensated balance wheel);

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So my questions are:

1) is the crystal original and if so, why the flat ground piece in the "middle" and how were these crystals made?

2) Provides the tail-end of the pallet-fork indeed the banking and is 59 degrees lift-angle common on these old watches?

3) How to further dismantle the main-barrel?

4) Any clues where this watch was manufactured and its age?

5) Was this watch, at that time, a "run-of-the-mill"-grade or a bit more than that?

 

Hope to hear your comments 😉

 

 

Edited by Endeavor
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I would say the glass is the original one, imperfections were common back then. The pallets are what I would expect to find however someone has heated them that is why they are looking blue and I have noticed a slight bend in the pallet, for my eyes it is a bad photo of the pallet stones so I can't comment on them, but repairs have been carried out because the pallets should not be blued. The barrel is something you will not have come across and it will be a puzzle. You need to remove the mainspring, put the key on the arbor and with a pair of smooth jaw pliers hold the outside of the arbor and unscrew it, when unscrewed you can remove it from the plate. I see the Geneva stop work is missing, many are missing.  The watch would have been made near the French Swiss border, date around the 1860 could be a little later. Made in there thousands, but parts are very rarely interchangeable. I have repaired pocket watches with the same style pallets with banking pins so I'm not sure if the style has anything do do with not having banking pins, if I had to guess I would say no.

I think I have covered your questions, if you have any more just ask.   

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10 minutes ago, oldhippy said:

however someone has heated them that is why they are looking blue

Thank you very much for your answer 😉 I'm afraid the blue comes from the USB-microscope led lights, they are blue. I don't have a decent camera on my 7x-45x microscope and the iPhone just doesn't cut it.

The fork is normal metal color.

10 minutes ago, oldhippy said:

I see the Geneva stop work is missing

Can you elaborate on that? What is the "Geneva stop work" and, apparently common,   why is it missing?

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5 minutes ago, Endeavor said:

Can you elaborate on that? What is the "Geneva stop work" and, apparently common,   why is it missing?

there are certain things that watchmakers like to collect. We like to collect the jewels out of the watch because are extremely valuable and someday will sell them and retire and a life of luxury. I actually saw a small bottle of jewels on eBay for the person selling them said that these of the jewels the watchmaker took out of watches. Then the next thing the steel is the stop works because we can and nobody will see that. The unfortunate reality is people of no idea what it is and setting it up can be confusing so the simpleminded watchmaker the past just never put it back in. then yes the watch will work fine without it's the big thing that the stop works did was with the mainsprings in the past the power was very on the even so you could pick a better section of the mainspring. Or basically you didn't use the extreme ends of the spring it also met when the watch came to a stop it came to instant stop it ran X hours exactly but he still had much better power reserve can zero in the hopefully middle part of the mainspring

2 hours ago, Endeavor said:

1) To start with the glass crystal; Initially it looked liked that somebody had crudely attempted to remove scratches in the center of the glass, not dead-center, but slightly off-center. However, JohnR725 pointed out that this could be the original crystal and they were made like this (?). It was a bit hard to capture on camera, but you can see the flat spot pointed at by the arrow;

then I have a link scroll down until you get to Bullseye Crystal. At least that's my guess usually when it's in the center that's what they are although the true bull's-eye as on the website can be quite aggressive as to what they are yours is much more subtle but it still could be of manufacturing thing. It's one of the reasons I don't like to change crystals like this unless is an absolute necessity because getting an exact crystal is difficult.

http://www.pocketwatchrepair.com/how-to/crystals.php

2 hours ago, Endeavor said:

whopping ≈59 degrees ! (?)

as reminder a watch like this was made before people can afford to buy a Chinese or Swiss timing machines so without a timing machine and without a lot of the knowledge of understanding watches we can end up with lots of very interesting things like your pallet fork also which end up with all sorts of interesting lift angles so 59° conceivably is extremely valid I think I've seen as high as 60 something on a watch I was doing and as low as maybe in the 30s and have to go find my list to see what I've done in the past so yes you can have a big variation. Oh and did not expect to get 300° of amplitude because they didn't have a timing machine and that was not their attempt

oh and before we get any further on this this was not a mass-produced watch made in a factory basically this is a classic Swiss cottage industry watch everything was made in separate cottages at some point in time it came together somebody purchased the wheels and typically under the dial and I enhanced your image a little bit notice the scribe marks somebody hand laid out each of the wheels in this watch. This is where when people are asking about these type of watches I want to identify it to purchase spare parts which unfortunately are not available because everything was basically handmade for this watch to a certain degree or definitely hand if it would be a better description

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2 hours ago, Endeavor said:

pallet-jewels

classically on a lot of vintage watches and even quite a bit later the pallet jewels are found exactly as you half. So they're not visible where you normally think they are but they are there. Then all of the jewels in the watch are going to be natural this was before synthetic are typically the garnet or possibly synthetic sapphire in some English watches their quartz crystal. Then there usually really nice and take a look really pretty.

2 hours ago, Endeavor said:

The main-barrel is "floating". I took the key-guard off, but don't see how to dismantle it any further and how to get the main-spring out.

this is a perfect example of a classic suspended mainspring barrel I'm going to attach an image. So basic disassembly is sort of like a conventional spring you remove the lid. The mainspring comes out and still depend on how well they manufactured this or how much time they spent in doing things which are helpful. The arbor in the center the part that the mainspring goes on unscrew's center parts usually. Sometimes they'll put two opposing holes to allow you put something in the basically unscrew it her times you have to grab it like with a really large pin vice if you can and then sometimes is frozen on it will never unscrew. Then that becomes an issue as you'll have to get lubrication to go where it needs to go the HP 1300 oils are good because of tend to flow everywhere. So basically unscrew as it can all be disassembled cleaned lubricated reassemble. Oh and then for my amusement they steal the stop works and in some rare cases for a variety of reasons known and unknown somebody machines the main plate inputs in a plate so it's no longer suspended and usually they don't do a real good job when they're doing that.

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9 hours ago, oldhippy said:

This video explains the  geneva stop work.

Thanks a lot, in the video very well explained !

I managed to pry the barrel cap off and this is what I found. Before attempting to rotate anything and shear something off, how to proceed? Something in the two arbor holes and rotate clock- or counter-clockwise?

Another interesting observation is the repaired mainspring and the hook inside the barrel. This will allow me to insert a modern spring ...

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Mainspring height 3.44mm, strength: 22, Length of the repaired spring measured about 430-440mm. Will check with the spring-calculator:  https://www.vintagewatchstraps.com/mainsprings.php

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Edited by Endeavor
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1 hour ago, Endeavor said:

Something in the two arbor holes and rotate clock- or counter-clockwise?

they should go in the opposite direction of the direction that the mainspring is pulling in. Because otherwise you wouldn't want the mainspring unscrewing it in the barrel. The only problem is a lot of times are on really really tight fortunately you have the two holes. I've had some typically without the holes and I've given up trying to unscrew it. Which is a pain for lubrication then because it's not really accessible enough to try to get the oil the flow in their not good at all. But at least yours looks like it's in good condition.

 

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One step further 😉

The two needles inserted in the holes were too weak and one needle snapped off. Carefully with two pliers, one on the winding-square and one on the arbor, turning in this case counter-clockwise, did the trick. Nothing scratched, damaged or broken 😇

Apart from the balance assembly, all other parts are now stripped, ready for cleaning and inspection.

BTW; I had contact with the seller, who's a collector and he also thinks that the crystal is the original Bulls-eye crystal. The flat piece should prevent the watch from "wobbling around" when laying Dial-Down.

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Edited by Endeavor
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