My first watch part.

[Neverenoughwatches]

Eyup watch peeps hows we all doing. On my way to making my first watch part, this is a Kasper 700 setting lever around 8mm long made from an old feeler gauge. I still have 4 holes to drill 3 pins to fit and a hole to thread yey and its taken me 4 hours to get this far shaping it and polishing the edge although i did make a miniature diamond file as well. It is still in its hardened state, so that needs addressing before i can drill out and tap one of the holes for the set lev screw. Its not perfect but I'm fairly pleased with result, and I've learnt a lot with this first go. Getting into the knack of holding it and working around it with a file and a degussit stone and under a microscope took some time.  If you think you have the right shape with a magnifier or a visor then think again, try x40 magnification, the cut from a 2000 grit diamond file looks the teeth of a 10 tpi hand saw

[mikepilk]

5 minutes ago, Neverenoughwatches said:

and its taken me 4 hours to get this far shaping it and polishing the edge although i did make a miniature diamond file as well. It is still in its hardened state, so that needs addressing before i can drill out and tap one of the holes for the set lev screw. 

Nice work @Neverenoughwatches, it looks good.

My only question is : if you now need to anneal it to drill the holes, why didn't you do that first, which makes shaping it so much easier. When annealed, I could have sawn and filed that in 30 mins, not 4 hours grinding 

My problem is drilling the holes. I always do that first, so if I screw up, I don't waste time shaping.  How are you going to drill the holes ?

[Neverenoughwatches]

3 minutes ago, mikepilk said:

Nice work @Neverenoughwatches, it looks good.

My only question is : if you now need to anneal it to drill the holes, why didn't you do that first, which makes shaping it so much easier. When annealed, I could have sawn and filed that in 30 mins, not 4 hours grinding 

My problem is drilling the holes. I always do that first, so if I screw up, I don't waste time shaping.  How are you going to drill the holes ?

Haha initially i was playing around with different bits of steel wondering what to use, seeing what files i had would cut which bits of steel. No files would touch any of the steel without stripping the file's teeth. So then i set up a little grinding station and it all started to turn into a bit of an experiment. Stuck the broken part onto the end of a feeler gauge, rough cut the part with a grinding stone and diamond wheel which was extremely easy, didn't have a way to anneal the steel correctly, so i just went with making a diamond file which cut into the steel really well and just carried on from there. Short story is ' i got impatient and just wanted to f around ' . Tbh i could have made life really easy for myself and bought the part from Cousins for fiver,  but thats just not me, what is me is wanting to learn something which i did. Next time i will do it very differently, the first thing i will do is anneal a piece of steel

29 minutes ago, mikepilk said:

My problem is drilling the holes. I always do that first, so if I screw up, I don't waste time shaping.  How are you going to drill the holes ?

That is the best way for more than that reason. Next time i will anneal some steel, remove any pins on the broken part and drill through where the pins were located. Stick the part to the steel and drill off all the holes directly through the old part. Fit the pins in the steel then slide the old part over the pins and stick it down, cut out the shape using the old part as a fixed template.