Fabricating a new part

[Jon]

Hi all,

I recently had an 8-day watch/clock to service and found that the winding stem fell out of the watch very easily. It is a pin-set movement, so the winding stem shouldn't be able to move. It should only wind the movement. My first thought when I was handed the watch was that there must be a part that was broken for this to happen. The movement doesn't have a setting lever, as the watch yoke is pushed toward the motion work to set the hands, but it does have a part that clamps over the indentation in the winding stem and is held by what can only be described as a winding stem clamp screw. This screw when loosened will allow the winding stem to be removed from the movement.

Anyway, when I started to disassemble the movement my guess was true that the clamp that held the winding stem in the movement was broken. It looked like in the past someone had fabricated this broken part as a replacement for the original and had used metal that wasn't hardened and then tempered, so the inevitable had to happen and it broke. Probably when someone thought to set the hands that the winding stem should be pulled out and not realised that it is a pin set, or what is commonly known as a nail set watch movement.

I decided to get out my tool steel sheet and fabricate a new clamp and then harden and temper it, only to find that once I had spent some time cutting the shape with a coping saw and filing it to the correct size and shape the sheet that I bought from Cousins wasn't tool steel, or what Cousins refer to as 'Carbon Steel' but some crappy sheet of mild steel that their Chinese supplier had ripped them off with.

So, a word of warning here. If anyone is intending to buy a sheet of this crud from Cousins to make keyless work or tools etc. you'll be wasting your time and money. 

 

Edited December 20, 2023 by Jon